in life! Your servants rated higher in the pecking order than I did. They—’ she pulled the belt tight around her waist ‘—looked down on me!’
He let out a short laugh, as if he couldn’t quite believe he was hearing all of this. ‘I don’t know whether to weep for you or applaud you for stringing together more words than I’ve ever heard you manage in one go before!’
‘Oh, applaud, Nicolas,’ she flashed. ‘I deserve the applause for putting up with it all for as long as I actually did!’
He turned away, the movement dismissive. ‘You are beginning to bore me.’
‘Well, what’s new?’ she retorted. ‘You were bored with me within weeks of marrying me when you discovered I was going to be just a little more trouble than you thought I was worth! But I’ll tell you something, Nicolas,’ she continued hotly. ‘If you grew bored with the shy, timid little mouse you married in a fit of madness, then I certainly grew tired of the tall, dark, handsome god I found myself tied to, because he turned out to be just one of a very select, very well cared for but boringly similar flock of sheep!
‘Oh, their coats were exquisite,’ she railed on recklessly, ‘and they ate off the very best turf, but what they gained in fine finish they lost in good brain cells! They did the same things. They thought the same things. And they bleated on and on about the same things! Genetic farming, I think they call it. I had no idea it went on in human society as well as—’
‘Have you quite finished?’ he inserted coldly.
She nodded. ‘Yes.’ She felt flushed and breathless, incredibly elated. In all her twenty-five years she had never spoken to anyone like that. It had been almost as good as the sex!
‘Then I shall remove my—genetic abomination from your presence,’ he said, giving her a stiff, cold bow that was as big an insult as the way he had hated himself for touching her again.
‘After I have said one last thing,’ she threw at his retreating back. ‘Make a note of today’s date, Nicolas. For I took no precautions against what we just did in that bed over there, and I know for a fact that the idea just would not even enter your head! If I am pregnant because of tonight, I want there to be no doubt this time who the father of my child could be.’
He’d reached the door, from which he turned to slice her with a coldly shrivelling look. ‘A genetic mutation?’ he clipped out curtly. ‘What an appalling thought.’
Shot down. With one smooth, clever one-liner, he had managed to turn her wild tirade back on her. She didn’t know whether she wanted to scream or weep in bitter, blinding frustration!
What she actually did was sit on the edge of the bed and just—wilt.
CHAPTER SIX
BY THE time Nicolas got downstairs he was back to being the man most people knew him to be. He entered the study to find it a veritable Aladdin’s cave of hi-tech equipment. Toni, the two policemen, two men he did not recognise but knew came from some special services department—all of them stood or sat about messing with the complicated array of communications stuff.
Stone-faced, hard-eyed, he homed directly in on Toni.
Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash did Toni’s face reveal what he must be thinking, knowing how long Nicolas had been with Sara. ‘Almost time,’ he said quietly. ‘Everything is ready.’
Nicolas gave a curt nod and moved over to the desk. The others in the room watched him like wary cats following the hunting pace of a dangerous animal. They were split into three groups—one group tracing, one group talking, one man ready to hit a command the moment they were given the go-ahead.
He sat down. ‘Any problems?’ he clipped.
‘No.’ It was Toni who answered. ‘We have them pinned down to a certain area code, but to be sure this works we need more time.’
‘It has to work,’ Nicolas said grimly. ‘Failure means panic and panic means risk. I won’t have the child’s life put at risk—you understand?’ It wasn’t said to Toni but to the two special agents huddled in a corner across the room.
The phone on the desk began to ring. The room froze into total stillness. Nicolas sat very still in his chair, hands tense, eyes fixed on the two policemen. And waited.
Two rings. Three rings. It seemed an age. Four. He got the nod. He snatched up the phone. ‘Santino,’ he announced.
‘Ah, good evening, signore.’ The smooth, oily voice slid snake-like into every headphoned ear listening in. ‘You have resolved the small cash-flow problem, I hope …’
Dawn was just breaking the sky when Nicolas entered Sara’s room and gently shook her awake.
She sat up with a jerk. ‘What’s happened?’ she gasped, instantly alert, her eyes huge and frightened in her sleep-flushed face.
‘It’s over, cara,’ he murmured soothingly. ‘Your daughter is safe.’
‘Safe?’ She blinked up at him, not really taking the words in. ‘Safe, Nicolas?’ she repeated. ‘Really safe?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded.
‘Oh, God.’ Her hand whipped up to cover her wobbling mouth, her eyes, still badly bruised with the strain of it all, going luminous with tears of relief. ‘How …?’ she whispered. ‘Where is she?’
‘I will take you to her just as soon as you can get dressed and be ready to travel,’ he promised.
‘She’s not here?’ Then in a burst of alarm she cried, ‘Have they h-hurt her?’
‘No, to both questions,’ he answered calmingly. ‘Here—’ He turned away, then turned back to push a cup of something hot into her hand. ‘Drink this, then get dressed. I would like to leave here in half an hour. Can you be ready?’
‘I … Y-yes, of course …’ She was suffering from shock—a new kind of shock, the shock of deliverance from the pits of hell, which stopped her from asking the kind of questions she knew she should be asking.
‘Good.’ He nodded, then, turning, went quickly towards the door.
‘Nic!’ She stopped him, waiting for him to turn back to face her before saying huskily, ‘Thank you.’
After what had happened between them the night before, there was a certain amount of irony in that. But he took it at its face value, his half-nod an acknowledgement before he was turning away again.
‘Downstairs in half an hour,’ he instructed, and left her alone.
She was showered, dressed and ready to leave by the specified time. Nicolas was waiting for her in the hallway. He watched her come down the stairs towards him, his eyes drifting over the simple lines of the sage-green linen trousers and cream shirt she was wearing beneath an off-white jacket. She wore no make-up—she rarely ever did. And her hair she had brushed quickly and secured back from her face with a padded green band.
Nothing fancy. Nothing couture. Like the Sara he had first met. She had reverted to that person of simple tastes the moment he’d had her banished here to his
