Rings of Gold: Gold Ring of Betrayal / The Marriage Surrender / The Unforgettable Husband

She didn’t look comforted. She looked tormented. ‘You need sleep,’ he muttered.

‘Lia won’t sleep,’ she countered dully. ‘Not without Dandy.’ Pulling the fluffy pink teddy from her breast, her fingers began gently smoothing its soft fur. ‘He goes to bed with her every night. A nursery rhyme first, then a cuddle. Then she—’

‘Come out of here!’ he cut in harshly. Then when she went instantly quiet he added wearily, ‘You are only punishing yourself doing this.’

But she didn’t move, showed no sign at all that she’d even heard him, her fingers trailing gently over the satin-soft fur.

‘Sara!’ he bit out impatiently.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Go away if you don’t like it. But this is where I feel closest to my baby and this is where I’ll stay.’

Toni came up behind him then, catching the huskily spoken words and the way muscles began to work all over his friend and employer’s face. ‘OK?’ he said gruffly.

‘Get lost, Toni,’ Nicolas responded thickly, the very fact that once again he could speak to his best friend like that a revelation of what he was struggling with inside him.

Toni silently moved away, his handsome face carved in a grim mask of sympathy—whether for one or both of them he wasn’t sure himself. Certainly, Sara deserved sympathy for what she was having to endure. But he hadn’t expected to see Nic look so damned tormented by it.

Slowly Nicolas levered himself away from the door and came further into the room, releasing the light his frame had been blocking so he could see more clearly—the pretty pink walls dressed with baby pictures, white-painted shelves decked with baby toys. The carpet beneath his feet was pink, as were the curtains at the windows.

His face tightened and he moved stiffly to stand staring out at the still, dark night, pushing his hands into his trouser pockets.

Sara allowed herself to look at him. Look at this man whose lean, lithe body she had once known more intimately than she knew her own body. A man she had loved to just look at like this, to feel with that warm, dark sense that resided somewhere deep inside herself, the wonder of knowing that he belonged to her. This man, this—special man.

Hers. Just as unequivocally as she had been his.

He was eight years older than she and usually it showed. He used to like that, she recalled—like the way they contrasted with each other. Whereas he was dark she was fair, whereas he was hard she was soft, whereas he was cynical with worldly experience she was as innocent and naïve as a newborn babe.

They were complete opposites, he the tall, dark sophisticate with a cool maturity stamped into his lean features, she the small and delicate blonde whose youth and natural shyness made her vulnerable and therefore ignited his male need to protect.

He’d liked to have her at his side, to feel her hand clutching at one of his or resting in the crook of his arm, or simply to know that she needed to be standing close enough to touch him to feel at least bearably at ease in the élite kind of company he circulated in.

He had had the instincts of a killer shark in every other aspect of his life except where she was concerned; when he was with her his whole demeanour would soften so openly that it used to set other women’s teeth on edge in envy of something she possessed that they knew they could never emulate.

An innate femininity, he’d called it—a certain fragile delicacy of mind, body and spirit that most women these days had polished out of them before they even left their cradles.

But its novelty value had worn off after a while, especially when the pressure of his workload had grown heavier by the week and she had not appeared to be learning to cope well without his being right beside her. Then the shyness that had originally drawn him towards her had become an irritant that he had, in the end, had little patience with. Adding to that the fact that she had been seriously afraid of his father, he had actually become angry with her when she’d begged him at least to let her set up house for them on their own.

‘This is our home,’ he’d stated. ‘Is it not enough that you offend my father with your nervous attitude towards him without further insulting him by wanting to move out of this house?’

‘But he doesn’t like me.’ She’d tried to make him understand. ‘I’m not what he wanted for you, Nicolas, and he lets me know it at every opportunity he gets!’

‘He teases you for your shyness, that’s all. It is your own paranoia that makes you see everything he does as malicious!’

Which was just one display of his own blindness where Alfredo was concerned. For Alfredo had not been just malicious in his dealings with his son’s unwanted wife, he had been downright destructive.

‘OK,’ Nicolas said gruffly now. ‘Talk about it.’

The command made her blink, simply because she had been so lost inside her thoughts about him that she had forgotten he was actually there.

‘About what?’ she asked.

The profiled edges of his jaw flexed. ‘The child,’ he said. ‘What you’re feeling right now. Talk about it.’

Sara smiled wearily. ‘You don’t really want to hear.’

‘If it helps you, I will listen.’ He took a deep breath then let it out again. ‘Tell me what she is like,’ he invited in a low voice.

What was he thinking? she wondered curiously. What was he really thinking behind this—false fa

de of caring? Was he simply humouring her as his words suggested or was there something more profound going on here? Was Nicolas looking for an excuse for the right to care?

‘You saw her picture. She looks like me,’ she told him, wishing she could announce some clear physical evidence of the father who’d sired her child, but she couldn’t. ‘My features. My hair. My eyes …’ She could have told him her daughter had her father’s smile, his stubbornness, his ability to charm the socks off anyone. But it would not be enough, so she didn’t say it. ‘She was a late talker but an early walker. And she likes to be smiled at. If you frown at her she’ll cry. She has done from—’

Her throat locked, choking her, because she had a sudden vision of those people who had taken her, frowning all the time and—

Oh, God. ‘Nicolas,’ she whispered starkly. ‘I’m frightened.’

He turned, his eyes as dark as his expression. ‘I know,’ he acknowledged quietly.

‘If they hurt my baby—’ Again she stopped, having to struggle with the fear clawing at her insides. ‘Would they hurt a baby?’ Her eyes were dark with torment. ‘Could they hurt a baby?’

‘Don’t,’ he sighed, but for once his voice sounded rough and unsteady, and the shoulders beneath the shirt flexed as if they could not cope with the tension attacking them. ‘They will not hurt her,’ he insisted. ‘It will serve them no useful purpose to hurt her.’

‘Then why this long silence?’ She stared at him wretchedly. ‘What are they waiting for?’

‘It is a game they are playing with us,’ he grimly replied. ‘The cruel game of making us sweat. They do it to push up the ante, so that by the time they do call again we will be so out of our heads that we will agree to anything.’

‘And will you—agree to anything?’

‘Oh, God,’ he rasped, his fingers going up to rub at his aching eyes. ‘How many times do I have to tell you that I will do whatever is in my power to get your child back?’ He turned on her angrily.

Remorse brought tears brimming into her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘But it’s just all so …’

His harsh sigh eased her of the need to finish. ‘Come on,’ he said, and bent to lift her firmly to her feet. ‘You are exhausted; you need rest which you will not get here.’

He was right; she was so tired that she could barely stand on her own, but she pleaded with him, ‘Don’t send me back to that bedroom. Please! I feel so alone there!’

‘You will not be alone.’ Grimly, he plucked the pink teddy from her fingers, then laid it back in the cot. ‘For I shall be with you.’

‘You?’ She frowned in surprised confusion. ‘But—’

‘I will brook no protest from you, Sara,’ he cut in warningly. ‘You need rest. I am offering you the physical comfort of my presence. The alternative is two sleeping tablets the doctor left for just such a contingency. The choice is yours. Make it, but make it quickly or I will do it for you.’

Her luminous eyes lifted to search his, trying to discover why he was suddenly being like this. His own lashes lowered, two arcs of black settling against his cheekbones to hide what was going on in his head.

Something happened inside her—a soft flutter of yearning. A need. A memory of a time when this man had been as gentle and caring as any woman could wish for.

‘You wish me to make this decision?’ he prompted, at her continuing silence.