instead she avoided it. ‘Nic, I need to get away from here. I can’t bear this place,’ she murmured thickly. ‘I never could.’
‘Were you so unhappy here?’
Without you here with me? she thought painfully. ‘Yes,’ she said, and sank down onto the sofa and wished to God that they’d never begun this whole wretched scene.
He didn’t say anything to that, and the silence between them throbbed with the heavy pull of her own heartbeat.
Then, quietly, he said, ‘You cannot leave.’
Her stomach gave a funny lurch. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked warily.
He turned. ‘Just what it said. You cannot leave here. The risk is too great. I can guarantee your safety here; I cannot in London.’ He gave a small shrug. ‘So here is where you and the child must stay.’
‘No.’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘I am not giving you a choice,’ he grimly informed her.
It brought her back to her feet. ‘Just because you refuse to divorce me does not mean you own me, Nicolas!’ she cried. ‘I can make my own choices. And I prefer to take my chance in London rather than live under this roof again!’
‘You speak as if it were you who was betrayed!’ he said derisively in response to that little speech.
‘I will not be put through the kind of misery I endured here a second time.’
‘Maybe you deserve to be miserable.’
That came straight from the gut, and she squeezed her eyes tight shut while she handled the blow it dealt her.
‘But my baby does not,’ she managed to parry. ‘She is the innocent one in all of this. Punish the mother and you will punish the child. Can you be that callous? That thirsty for revenge?’
‘I am not after revenge,’ he denied. ‘It is a simple case of logistics which decides it for us. This house is easier to guard against a repeat of what you have just been through. Therefore this is where you will live from now on. Comprende?’
Oh, she ‘comprended’ all right. The lord and master had spoken. End of discussion.
‘But I don’t have to eat with you,’ she countered, throwing herself back onto the sofa with a defiance about her that warned him she was not going to surrender this point to him as well! ‘I would rather starve first.’
‘And that is being childish,’ he derided.
Too true, she agreed. But there was no way she was going to sit at the same table as Alfredo Santino! No way.
‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to dress up and play happy dinner hour with you and your father—can’t you even allow me that one concession?’
He sighed, allowing some of his anger to escape with the sound. Then surprisingly he gave in. ‘I need to speak to Fabia before I leave you,’ he said. ‘Then I will have something sent down to you.’
With that, he walked off towards the bedroom, leaving Sara feeling annoyingly, frustratingly let down.
Though she didn’t know why.
Or refused to look at why.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SARA was squatting by the cultivated border of one of the many white-painted terrace walls, carefully coaxing bougainvillea strands around a wire support that she had just constructed, secure in the knowledge that she could hear Lia’s happy voice drifting up to her from where she played on the beach with Fabia, when an electric whirring sound behind her warned her of Alfredo’s approach.
She didn’t turn, did not so much as reveal she was aware of his presence. But her inner sigh was heavy. In the six days since she had arrived here, she had carefully avoided any contact at all with Alfredo. He came to see Lia each lunchtime, guiding his chair into the suite and staying long enough to share lunch with the baby, and Sara made herself distinctly scarce before he was due to arrive.
It was necessary for them to stay here, Nicolas had said. But necessary to whom? To this man in the wheelchair coming steadily towards her along the terrace? Of course it was.
It certainly wasn’t what Nicolas wanted, she thought bleakly, because she hadn’t even seen him since the first night she’d arrived here.
He had had his talk with Fabia, their two voices conversing in the quick Sicilian dialect Sara had never quite been able to keep up with even before her Italian had become rusty through lack of use.
When he’d come out of the bedroom again, he hadn’t even bothered to wish her goodnight, but had just left.
She hadn’t seen him since. The next morning she’d awoken to Fabia arriving with a manservant in tow carrying some heavy suitcases. They’d contained all her personal belongings. Nicolas must have had them flown in overnight from London. A further statement that this was to be a permanent situation. Fabia had also brought a message from Nicholas informing her that he’d had to fly back to New York.
He had been gone for almost a week now, and she refused point-blank to admit—even to herself—that she missed him.
The wheelchair stopped a couple of feet away. Sara felt his eyes on her, sensed him urging her to turn and acknowledge him. When she did not, it was he who broke the tense silence between them.
‘The garden has missed your special touch,’ he said.
‘I have nothing to say to you, Alfredo,’ she told him without pausing in what she was doing. ‘You are a mean, nasty, selfish old man who doesn’t deserve my attention. Or the attention of my daughter, come to that.’
Instead of taking exception to her outright attack on him, she was surprised to hear him give a soft chuckle. ‘I would say that constituted saying a lot,’ he remarked ruefully.
It made her turn, more out of suspicion than because she had been taken by surprise by his amiable tone. She was quite sure Alfredo could chuckle as pleasantly as that while thrusting a knife between her shoulderblades!
Still, this first real look at him without her being blinded by the horror of seeing her daughter clasped to his chest was a shock.
Dressed in a cream short-sleeved shirt open at the throat and a pair of brown trousers, he was still a remarkably daunting person—remarkable because he had been so drastically diminished in the purely physical sense.
Never anywhere near as tall as his son, he had once made up for his lack of inches with width. Wide shoulders, wide chest, wide hips, short, immovable trunks for legs—all of it solid-packed and tough. But now the width had gone, the muscle waste so dramatic that it had left behind it a mere shadow of what once had been, replacing it with a frailty so obvious that Sara began to understand why Nicolas was so angrily protective of what pathetic amount was left.
The sun was shining down on his silvered head—the hair was not thinning, she noted. At least he had been saved that emasculation.
