‘I am in the middle of an important meeting here,’ he snapped. ‘So do you think you could get to the point of this—unexpected—honour?’
Sarcasm, hard and tight. Her eyes closed again, her chest so cramped she could barely drag air into her lungs as each angry word hit her exactly where it was aimed to hit.
‘I n-need...’
What did she need? she then stopped to wonder. She had become so addled by now that her reason for calling him at all had suddenly got lost in the ferment of her panic.
‘I n-need...’ Moistening her dry lips, she tried again. ‘Your—advice about something,’ she hedged, knowing she couldn’t just tell him outright that the only reason she was phoning him after all this time was to ask for money! ‘Do you think you could possibly m-meet me somewhere, s-so we can talk?’
No reply. Her nerve-ends reached snapping point A tight, prickling feeling began to scramble its way up from her tingling toes to her hairline. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t swallow, and, worse than all of that, she felt like weeping.
And if Sandro knew that he would fall off his chair in shock, she mocked herself.
‘I am flying to Rome this evening,’ he informed her brusquely. ‘And my day is fully taken up with meetings until I leave for the airport. It will have to wait until I get back next week.’
‘No!’ That wouldn’t do! ‘I can’t wait that long. I...’ Her voice trailed away, her mind flying off in another direction as she bit into her bottom lip on a fresh wave of desperation. Then, defeatedly, she whispered, ‘It doesn’t m-matter. I’m s-sorry to have—’
‘Don’t you damn well dare put that phone down on me!’ Sandro warned on an angry growl that told her that, even after all this time, he could still read her intentions like an open book.
And she could hear him muttering something to himself—cursing most likely—in Italian, because Sandro always did revert to his native tongue when he was really angry. She could even see him in full detail while he did it. Tall and lean, an unbearably handsome Latin dark figure, with brown velvet eyes that turned black when angry and a beautifully shaped intensely sensual mouth that could kiss like no mouth she had ever experienced, but could also spit all sorts at her without her knowing what the words were—but, hell, did she get their drift!
Then, emerging from the middle of all that Latin temperament, came a warning beep that the phone needed feeding yet again.
‘I haven’t any more money!’ she gasped into the mouthpiece while her eyes flickered anxiously across the dirty floor at her feet. ‘I’ll have to—’
‘Give me your number!’ Sandro snapped.
‘But there’s a man waiting to use the telephone. I have to—’
‘Maledizione!’ he cursed. ‘The number, Joanna!’
She gave it. Her time ran out and the line went dead. She dropped the receiver back onto its rest, then just stood there staring at it, unsure if Sandro had managed to get down every digit before they were cut off, scared that he had done, and terrified that he had not!
Almost faint with stress and wretched confusion, she bent again to search the grubby ground for her other lost coins, found them, then stepped out of the call box to let the man waiting outside take his turn on the telephone.
He sidled past her as though she was some kind of freak. She didn’t blame him; if he had been watching her enact her nervous breakdown inside that telephone box, then she knew she must have looked like a freak!
Sandro’s fault; it was always Sandro’s fault when she went to pieces like this. No one else could make her lose all her usually ice-cold self-possession as completely he could. And he had been doing it since the first time she ever set eyes on him. A few short minutes of his undivided company, and he had always been able to turn her into a shivering, quivering wreck of a useless creature.
Sex.
That single telling word hit her with a hard, cruel honesty. The difference between Sandro and every other man she had ever met was the fact that he was the only one who could stir her up sexually.
And that was why she was standing here, a shivering, quivering wreck. Because in stirring her up sexually he also stirred up all the phobias that sent her into this kind of panic.
Fear was the main thing: a stark, staring fear that if she ever gave in to the sex then her life would be over.
Because he would know then, wouldn’t he? Know what she was and despise her for it
The man came out of the phone box. He hadn’t been much more than a couple of minutes, which made her feel even guiltier for keeping him waiting as long as she had.
‘I’m so sorry I was so long,’ she felt compelled to say. ‘Only I had difficulty—’
The phone inside the kiosk began to ring and she made a sudden desperate lurch for it, forgetting about the man, forgetting everything as she snatched the receiver to her ear again.
‘What the hell happened?’ Sandro’s voice shot down the line at her. ‘I have been trying that number for the last five minutes and kept getting an engaged signal! Were you stupid enough to hold onto the receiver instead of hanging up and waiting for me to call you back?’
Well, Joanna thought ruefully, that just about said it. Stupid. He thought her that stupid, and Sandro suffered fools as most people suffered raging toothache.
‘I let the man I told you was waiting use the phone,’ she explained.
Another of those Italian curses hit her burning eardrums, then she heard him take in a deep breath of air and his voice, when it came again, was more as it should be, grim but controlled.
‘What is it you want from me, Joanna,’ he demanded. ‘Since when have you ever wanted anything from me?’
Which only showed that even when he was under control he still couldn’t resist another dig at her.
‘It isn’t something I can discuss over the telephone,’ she told him. Then as her own temper suddenly flared, ‘And if this is a taste of how your attitude is going to be, then it probably isn’t worth me taking it any further!’
‘OK—OK,’ he conceded on a heavy sigh. ‘So I am reacting badly. But I am up to my neck in work at the moment, and the last thing I expected, on top of it all, was for my long-lost wife to give me a call!’
‘Try for sarcasm,’ she snapped. ‘Pleasantries just don’t become you somehow.’
Their simultaneous sighs were acknowledgements that they both recognised they were reacting to each other now as they had always used to do: biting and scratching.
‘How can I help you?’ he asked, with more heaviness than hostility.
And Joanna relented too, saying with an equal heaviness. ‘If you can’t find time to see me today, Sandro, then I’m afraid I have been wasting your valuable time. I did try to tell you that,’ she couldn’t resist adding, ‘before you went off at half-cock.’
‘Five
