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
