closed around her trembling fingers, but she was not really aware of it as she forced herself to move forwards through the doors into a cool square hallway where she paused for a moment while her eyes adjusted themselves to the dimmer light inside.
It was all so familiar. The beautiful paintings adorning the walls, the tasteful mix of dark, well-polished furniture, delicate ornaments, and vases of flowers.
And the stony-faced housekeeper standing a couple of yards inside the hall.
But no baby to greet her. She glanced at Nicolas, eyes questioning, anxious. He stepped forward and spoke in low tones to the housekeeper then turned to come and take hold of Sara’s arm.
‘Where—?’ she jerked out tensely.
‘This way,’ he said, his face stiff. He began leading her across the entrance hall and through an archway that she knew led to one of several stone staircases.
The house was built on several levels. Here on the top floor were the more functional services like kitchens and garages and servant accommodation. Then came the formal reception rooms where the Santino family entertained. Next was the floor given over entirely to the Santino empire, with office suites with all the relevant state-of-the-art equipment to go with them. The next tier housed the family’s private bedroom suites, followed by the guest suites and finally the less formal pool and recreational tier where you would find the only televisions in the whole place, and the garden terrace, which stepped downwards to the tiny pebbly beach below.
There were some two hundred steps in all from top terrace to beach. Sara had counted them once during one of her lonely periods while Nicolas had been away and his father had driven her outside to seek refuge from his constant hostility. But those two hundred steps were outside. Inside, each level had its own stairway worked in a dogleg which took you from tier to tier.
And as Nicolas led the way down her legs began to wobble, memories she would have much preferred to keep at bay beginning to crowd her mind.
Memories of a beautiful suite of rooms with a huge, white-silk-draped canopied bed and a man lying naked and glossy brown against the pure white sheets. A man who loved to just lie there like that and watch her as she moved about the room, loved to watch her brush her hair and cream her skin and …
‘Sara.’
She’d stopped. She hadn’t realised she’d stopped until the sound of her name brought her jolting to the present. Her lashes fell then lifted again to reveal the glaze of pained reminiscence as she found the same man watching her.
The same man but not the same, she noted bleakly. The one who’d liked to watch her move about their bedroom had worn a look of lazy pleasure on his face. This one looked hard and cold and …
‘This way,’ he prompted.
He was standing by the stairway to the next level. She frowned in puzzlement. ‘But …’ Her hand wafted out in the vague direction of the bedrooms, her logic expecting Lia to be in one of those. Then it hit her, and if she had been up to it she would have smiled at her own stupidity. The next level contained the guest suites. Of course Lia would be there. She was not family. Just as Sara herself was no longer family—not in the true sense of the word anyway.
She followed him, her head lowered so he would not read the irony she knew must be written in her eyes. In silence they made their way down to the next level, and here, as she had expected, Nicolas led the way to a suite of rooms, then paused by the door as if taking a moment to brace himself for what was to come.
So did Sara.
The door swung open, she stepped up beside him—then went perfectly still, heart, lungs, everything inside her crashing to a shuddering halt at the sight that met her eyes.
Across the room and to one side of the open plate-glass window which led outside was a man. His dark hair was peppered with more silver than she remembered, his once big frame radically diminished by the wheelchair he was sitting in.
But it was not just the man who held all her stunned attention. It was what he held in his arms.
Lying against his chest was a baby wearing nothing more than a disposable nappy and a white cotton vest. Her golden head was cushioned on his shoulder, her little arms clinging tightly to his neck.
Her eyes blurred out of focus then back again, the sight of her child—her child!—clinging to her worst enemy seeming to rock the very ground she stood upon.
Then the greying head was turning, the bright, hunter’s gold eyes searching out and homing directly in on Sara’s eyes. And the expression glowing in them froze the blood inside her veins.
It was possession, fierce and parental. And at last Sara began to understand what this had all been about.
The child. Her child!
In his illness, Alfredo Santino had seen his own mortality. He had seen himself dying without ever holding his own grandchild. It no longer mattered that the child was also Sara’s child. He wanted. And what Alfredo Santino wanted he got, even if it meant stealing to get it. Even if it meant having the woman he hated most coming back into his life. He wanted Lia. And there was no longer a single doubt in Sara’s mind that it had been Alfredo who had orchestrated her child’s abduction.
‘No!’ Sheer instinct brought the thick denial bursting from her locked throat. And, almost stumbling in her haste, she went towards him, saw, with a horror that tightened like a steel clasp around her chest, his hands move on her baby in a convulsive act of ownership.
‘She would accept comfort from no one else but me!’ he exclaimed in glowing triumph as Sara reached him. ‘See how she clings. See!’
‘No,’ Sara breathed again, denying it, denying his right to feel this way about her baby—as he had denied the little girl her right to know the love of her own father!
As if the baby sensed the closeness of her mother, she gave a shaky sigh against Alfredo’s shoulder, bringing Sara’s attention swerving back her way. And suddenly Alfredo was forgotten. Nicolas, still standing tense and silent in the doorway, was forgotten, everything was wiped clean out of her mind as she watched the head of golden curls lift and slowly turn. A deep frown shadowing her luminous eyes, her Cupid’s-bow mouth cross and pouting, she looked up at her mother, released another unsteady sigh then simply stretched out an arm towards Sara.
Sara bent, lifted the baby from Alfredo, folded her to her, one set of fingers spreading across the little back, the others cupping the golden head. The baby curved herself, foetus-like, into her mother, head nuzzling into her throat, arms tucking in between Sara’s breasts.
Then neither moved. Neither spoke. Neither wept. Sara simply stood there with her eyes closed and her face a complete and utter blank, the emotion she was experiencing so deep that none of it was left to show on her whitened face.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS like witnessing the most spiritual communion life could offer. And no one privy to it could not be moved by the vision. Not Alfredo, who lowered his silvered head and shook it with a sharp, jerky motion that was almost pained. Not the thin, dark-haired woman standing quietly to one side of the room, whose eyes filled with aching tears. Not even Nicolas, still standing tensely in the open doorway, who had to close his eyes to block out the heart-wrenching vision.
The seconds
