not there when she had always been there for her before—always!
What kind of unfeeling monster would take a small child away from her mama? she wondered starkly. What made a person that bad inside? That cruel? That—?
She stopped, dragging her hands from her face as a sudden thought leapt into her head.
There really was only one person she knew who was capable of doing something like this.
Alfredo Santino. Father to the son. And ten times more ruthless than Nicolas could ever learn to be.
And he hated Sara. Hated her for daring to think herself good enough for his wonderful son. He was the man who had vowed retribution on her for luring his son away from the high-powered Sicilian marriage he’d had mapped out for him, which had then made the father look a fool in the eyes of his peers—if Alfredo Santino accepted anyone as his peer, that was. If Nicolas saw himself as omnipotent, then the father considered himself the same but more so.
But Alfredo had already exacted his retribution on her, surely? She frowned. So why—?
‘No.’ Suddenly she was on her feet again, still trembling—not with weakness this time but with a stark, clamouring.fear that made it a struggle even to keep upright as she stumbled across the drawing-room floor and out into the hall.
CHAPTER TWO
A BIG man in a grey suit and with a tough-looking face stood guard just outside the door. A stranger.
‘Where is Nicolas?’ she asked shakily. ‘M-my husband, where is he?’
His gaze drifted towards the closed study door. ‘Mr Santino wished not to be disturbed.’
Sicilian. His accent was as Sicilian as the voice that had spoken to her on the phone. She shuddered and stepped past him, ignoring the very unsubtle hint in his reply, to hurry across the hallway and push open the study door.
He was half sitting on the edge of the big solid oak desk and he wasn’t alone. The two policemen were with him, and someone she instantly recognised as Nicolas’s right-hand man. Toni Valetta. All of them were in a huddle around something on the desk with their heads tilted down. But they shot upright in surprise at her abrupt entrance.
She ignored them all, her anxious eyes homing in on the only one in this room who counted. ‘Nicolas...’ She took a couple of urgent steps towards him. ‘I—’
His hand snaked out—not towards her but to something on the desk. And it was only as she heard an electronic click followed by a sudden deathly silence that it hit her just what had been going on here, and what her ears had picked up but her mind had refused to recognise until Nicolas had rendered the room silent.
God. She stopped, went white, closed her eyes, swayed. It had been her Lia’s voice, her baby murmuring, ‘Mama? Mama?’ before it had been so severely cut off.
‘Don’t touch her!’
The command was barked from a raspingly threatening throat.
She didn’t know who had tried to touch her, who had reached her first as she began to sink, as if in slow motion, to the thick carpet beneath her feet. But she recognised Nicolas’s arms as they came around her, breaking her fall, catching her to his chest and holding her there as something solid hit the back of her knees, impelling her to sit down.
He didn’t leave go, lowering his body with hers as he guided her into the chair, so that she could still lean weakly against him. Her heart had accelerated out of all control, her breathing fast and shallow, her mind—her mind blanked out by a horror that was more than she could bear.
And he was cursing softly, roundly, cursing in Italian, in English, cursing over her head at someone, cursing at her. Her fingers came up, ice-cold and numb, scrambling over his shirtfront and up his taut throat until they found his mouth, tight-lipped with fury.
She could have slapped him full in the face for the reaction she got. He froze, right there in front of all those watching faces; he froze into a statue of stunned silence with her trembling fingers pressed against his mouth.
‘Nic,’ she whispered frailly, not even knowing that she had shortened his name to that more intimate version she’d rarely used to call him, and only then when she’d been totally, utterly lost in him. ‘My baby. That was my baby...’
Nicolas Santino, squatting there with her wonderful hair splayed across his big shoulders so that the sweet rose scent of it completely surrounded him, closed his hard eyes on a moment of stark, muscle-locking pain.
Then, ‘Shush,’ he murmured, and reached up to grasp the fingers covering his mouth, touching them briefly to his lips before clasping them gently in his hand. ‘Sara, she is fine. She is asking for you but she is not distressed. You understand me, cara? She is—’
She passed out. At last—and perhaps it seemed fortunate to all those who had worriedly observed her all day—she finally caved in beneath the pressure of it all and went limp against the man holding her.
She came around to find herself in her own room, lying on her own bed, with the doctor leaning over her. He smiled warmly but briefly. ‘I want you to take these, Mrs Santino,’ he murmured, holding two small white pills and a glass of water out to her.
But she shook her head, closing her eyes again while she tried to remember what had happened. She remembered running across the hall, remembered opening the door to the study and racing inside, but what she couldn’t remember was why she’d felt the dire need to go there. She remembered seeing Nicolas in the room, and Toni and the two policemen. She remembered them all jerking to attention at her rude entry and her taking several steps towards Nicolas. Then—
Oh, God. Full recall shuddered through her on a nauseous wave. ‘Where’s Nicolas?’ she gasped.
‘Here,’ his grim voice replied.
Her eyes flickered open to find him looking down at her from the other side of the bed. He looked different somehow, as if some of his usual arrogance had been stripped away. ‘You heard from them, didn’t you?’ she whispered faintly. ‘They called before the deadline.’ Tears pushed into her eyes. ‘They let my baby talk to you.’
The comer of his tensely held mouth ticked. ‘Take the two pills the doctor is offering you, Sara,’ was all he said by way of a reply.
She shook her head in refusal again. ‘I want to know what they said,’ she insisted.
‘When you take the two pills, I will tell you what they said.’
But still she refused. ‘You just want to put me to sleep. And I won’t be put to sleep!’
‘They are not sleeping tablets, Mrs Santino,’ the doctor asserted. ‘You won’t sleep if you don’t want to, but they will help to relax you a little. I’m telling you the truth,’ he tagged on gravely as her sceptical gaze drifted his way. ‘I can understand your need to remain alert throughout this ordeal, but I doubt your ability to do so if you don’t accept some help. Shock and stress should not be treated lightly. You’re near a complete collapse,’ he diagnosed. ‘Another shock like the one you received downstairs may just have the effect you’ve been fighting so hard against and shut you down completely. Take the pills.’ He offered them to her again. ‘Trust
