the pills, Sara.’ Nicolas placed his own weight behind the advice, voice grim, utterly unmoving. ‘Or watch me hold you down while the doctor sticks a hypodermic syringe in your arm.’
She took the pills. Nicolas had not and never would make idle threats. And she wasn’t a fool. She knew that if they did resort to a needle it would not be injecting a relaxing aid into her system.
Nobody spoke for several minutes after that, Sara lying there with her eyes closed, the doctor standing by the bed with her wrist gently clasped between his finger and thumb, and the silence was so profound that she fancied she could actually hear the light tick of someone’s watch as it counted out the seconds.
She knew even before the doctor dropped her wrist and gave the back of her hand a pat that her pulse had lost that hectic flurry it had had for the last several hours and returned to a more normal rate. She sensed the two men exchanging glances then heard the soft tread of feet moving across the room. The bedroom door opened and closed, then once again she was alone with Nicolas.
‘You can tell me what happened now,’ she murmured, not bothering to open her eyes. ‘I won’t have hysterics.’
‘You did not have hysterics before,’ he pointed out. ‘You just dropped like a stone to the floor.’
‘Déjà vu, Nicolas?’ she taunted wanly.
To her surprise, he admitted it. ‘Yes,’ he said.
It 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.
