again. ‘Just a minute,’ she muttered, struggling to feed the only coin she had stopped from falling into the required slot with fingers that decidedly shook. The line cleared and Joanna took another few moments to pull her ragged nerves together. ‘I w-would like to speak to Mr—to Alessandro, please.’ She quickly changed tack, hoping the personal touch might get her past this next obstruction.
It didn’t. ‘I’m afraid I must insist on your name,’ Sandro’s secretary maintained.
Her name. Her teeth gritted together, eyes closing on a fresh bout of indecision. Now what did she do? she asked herself pensively. Tell the truth? Let this woman bear witness to the full depth of Sandro’s refusal, instead of the other cool voice she had spoken to before?
‘This is—M-Mrs Bonetti,’ she heard herself mumble, the name sounding as strange leaving her own lips as it must have sounded to the woman on the other end of the telephone line.
There was a short sharp pause. Then, ‘Mrs Bonetti?’ the voice repeated. ‘Mrs Alessandro Bonetti?’
‘Yes,’ Joanna confirmed, not blaming the woman for sounding so astonished. Joanna herself had never managed to come to terms with being that particular person. ‘Will you ask Alessandro if he has a few minutes he could spare for me, please?’
‘Of course,’ his secretary instantly agreed.
The line went quiet again. Joanna breathed an unsteady sigh into the mouthpiece, wondering how many cats she was setting loose amongst Sandro’s little pigeons by daring to make an announcement like that.
Again she waited, so tense now she could barely unclench her jaw-bone, the thrumming silence setting her foot tapping on the debris-littered concrete base of the call box, fingernails doing the same against the metal casing of the telephone. And there was a man standing just outside the kiosk, obviously waiting to use the telephone after her. He kept on sending her impatient glances and her palms felt sweaty; she tried running them one at a time down her denim-clad thighs but it didn’t make any difference, they still felt sweaty.
‘Mrs Bonetti?’
‘Yes?’ The single word shot like a bullet from her tension-locked throat.
‘Mr Bonetti is in conference at the moment.’ The voice sounded incredibly guarded all of a sudden. ‘But he said for you to leave your number and he will call you back as soon as he is free.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Joanna said, feeling a dragging sense of relief and a contrary wave of despair go sweeping through her. ‘I mean—I’m in a public call box and...’
Shaky fingers came up to push agitatedly through the long silken fall of her red-gold hair while she tried to think quickly with a brain that didn’t want to think at all. Sandro couldn’t speak to her and she didn’t think she could accumulate enough courage to do this again.
‘I’ll h-have to call him back,’ she stammered out finally, grasping at straws that really weren’t straws at all, but simply excuses to stop this before it soared out of all control. ‘Tell him I’ll call him back s-some time w-when I—’ Her excuses dried up. ‘Goodbye,’ she abruptly concluded, and went to replace the telephone.
But, ‘No! Mrs Bonetti!’ The secretary’s voice whipped down the line at her. ‘Please wait!’ she said urgently. ‘Mr Bonetti wants to know your reply before you... Just hold the line a moment longer—please...’
It was a plea—an anxious plea, which was the only thing that stopped Joanna from slamming down the receiver and getting out of there.
That and the fact that she had just had a revolting vision of Arthur Bates smiling at her like a very fat cat who was about to taste the cream. She shuddered again, feeling sick, feeling dizzy, feeling so uptight and confused now that she really didn’t know what she wanted to do.
Oh God. She closed her eyes, tried to get a hold on her swiftly decaying reason. Sandro or Arthur Bates? her mind kept on prodding at her. Arthur Bates or Sandro? The choice that was no choice.
Sandro...
Sandro, the man she had not allowed herself to make any contact with for two long wretched years.
Except when she’d told him about Molly, she then remembered, feeling what was left of the colour drain from her cheeks as poor Molly’s face swam painfully into her mind. She had tried to contact Sandro once—about Molly.
He had ignored her call for help then, she grimly reminded herself. So there was every chance that he was going to do the same now.
And why not? she derided. There was nothing left between them any more, hadn’t been for a long, long—
The phone began demanding more money again. She jumped like a startled deer, eyes flicking open to search a little wildly for another coin. It was only then that she remembered that she had knocked them all flying to the ground a few minutes earlier, and she bent down, functioning on pure instinct now because intelligence seemed to have completely deserted her.
But then, it always did when it came to Sandro, she acknowledged ruefully as her fingers scrambled amongst the dirt, cigarette ends and God alone knew what else that was littering the call box floor.
‘Mrs Bonetti?’
‘Yes,’ she gasped.
‘I’m putting you through to Mr Bonetti now...’
There was a crackling sound in her ear that made her wince. Her scrambling fingers discovered one of her missing coins. Grabbing at it, she straightened, face flushed now, breathing gone haywire, fingers fumbling as she attempted to push home the coin, the stupid panic turning her into a quivering, useless mess because she was about to hear Sandro’s dark velvet voice again and she didn’t know if she could bear it!
The man outside the call box got fed up with waiting and banged angrily on the glass. Joanna turned on him like a mad woman, her blue eyes flashing him a blinding glare of protest,
‘Joanna?’
And that was all it took for everything to come crashing down around her—the agitation, the panic—all crowding in and congealing into one seething ball of chest-tightening anguish.
He sounded gruff, he sounded terse, but oh, so familiar that her own voice locked itself into her throat. The man outside banged again; she closed her eyes and set her teeth and felt Sandro’s tension sizzle down the telephone line towards her, felt his impatience, his reluctance to accept this call.
‘Joanna?’ he repeated tersely. Then, ‘Damn it!’ she heard him curse. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ she answered breathlessly, and knew she had just taken one of the biggest, bravest steps of her life with that one tiny word of confirmation. ‘S-sorry.’ She apologised for the tense delay in taking it, and tried to relax her jaw in an effort to find some semblance of calm. ‘I dropped my m-money on the call box f-floor and couldn’t find it,’ she explained. ‘And there’s a m-man standing outside w-waiting to use the telephone. He keeps banging on the glass and I—’
The rest was cut off—by herself, because she realised on a wave of despair that she was babbling like an idiot.
Sandro must have been thinking the exact same thing because his
