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

‘Hating yourself now, Nicolas?’ she taunted lazily.

He went still, then jerked his head round to look at her, the hunter’s gold eyes barely brushing over her before they were flicking away again. ‘Yes,’ he answered flatly.

He didn’t even have the decency to deny it, and that hurt. ‘You seduced me,’ she reminded him. ‘It was not the other way round.’

‘I know it.’ Snatching up his shirt, he tugged it on. ‘I am not blaming you for my own—’

He didn’t finish. His jaw flexing with tension, he pushed buttons into holes. Sara watched him, too spent to do much else as he dropped into a chair to pull on socks and shoes. That done, he stood up, glanced at her then away again, as if he couldn’t stand looking at her lying there like that, with her eyes languid and her body wearing the flush of a woman who had just been devoured.

‘Will you be—all right?’ he asked stiffly. ‘If I leave you?’

Desperate to get away now he had disgraced himself? she wondered.

‘Without you to comfort me, you mean?’ she mocked. ‘Yes, I’m sure I shall manage.’ Her sarcasm bit. ‘I’m used to being alone, after all,’ she added bleakly. ‘I’ve been alone since I was thirteen.’

‘Not always,’ he gritted. ‘Once, until you spoiled it, you had me.’

‘Really?’ She sliced a glance at him, his bitterness igniting her bitterness, and she scrambled off the bed to reach angrily for her robe. She didn’t even care that she was exposing her body to him. Nicolas hated himself for desiring her, so let him gaze at her naked body—and hate!

‘Alone, Nicolas,’ she repeated. ‘Even with you. You gave me no support, no rights. No say in how we ran our marriage. If I dared to object, you shut me up in the most effective way you knew how.’ She meant in bed, and he knew it; his grim mouth tightened. ‘If I persisted, you shot me down with hard words and derision. You thought it amusing that I liked to be amongst flowers rather than people, but never once allowed me the concession that maybe I had a right to like what I wanted to like no matter how empty-headed and frivolous it seemed to you.’

‘I never considered you empty-headed,’ he muttered.

‘You rarely considered me at all,’ she countered, searching angrily around her for the tie to her robe. ‘Except where it mattered exclusively to you. Then I was expected to put up and shut up, because you knew best and I was, after all, just the pretty little doll you’d had the grace to elevate onto such an exalted plateau in life! Your servants rated higher in the pecking order than I did. They—’ she pulled the belt tight around her waist ‘—looked down on me!’

He let out a short laugh, as if he couldn’t quite believe he was hearing all of this. ‘I don’t know whether to weep for you or applaud you for stringing together more words than I’ve ever heard you manage in one go before!’

‘Oh, applaud, Nicolas,’ she flashed. ‘I deserve the applause for putting up with it all for as long as I actually did!’

He turned away, the movement dismissive. ‘You are beginning to bore me.’

‘Well, what’s new?’ she retorted. ‘You were bored with me within weeks of marrying me when you discovered I was going to be just a little more trouble than you thought I was worth! But I’ll tell you something, Nicolas,’ she continued hotly. ‘If you grew bored with the shy, timid little mouse you married in a fit of madness, then I certainly grew tired of the tall, dark, handsome god I found myself tied to, because he turned out to be just one of a very select, very well cared for but boringly similar flock of sheep!

‘Oh, their coats were exquisite,’ she railed on recklessly, ‘and they ate off the very best turf, but what they gained in fine finish they lost in good brain cells! They did the same things. They thought the same things. And they bleated on and on about the same things! Genetic farming, I think they call it. I had no idea it went on in human society as well as—’

‘Have you quite finished?’ he inserted coldly.

She nodded. ‘Yes.’ She felt flushed and breathless, incredibly elated. In all her twenty-five years she had never spoken to anyone like that. It had been almost as good as the sex!

‘Then I shall remove my—genetic abomination from your presence,’ he said, giving her a stiff, cold bow that was as big an insult as the way he had hated himself for touching her again.

‘After I have said one last thing,’ she threw at his retreating back. ‘Make a note of today’s date, Nicolas. For I took no precautions against what we just did in that bed over there, and I know for a fact that the idea just would not even enter your head! If I am pregnant because of tonight, I want there to be no doubt this time who the father of my child could be.’

He’d reached the door, from which he turned to slice her with a coldly shrivelling look. ‘A genetic mutation?’ he clipped out curtly. ‘What an appalling thought.’

Shot down. With one smooth, clever one-liner, he had managed to turn her wild tirade back on her. She didn’t know whether she wanted to scream or weep in bitter, blinding frustration!

What she actually did was sit on the edge of the bed and just—wilt.

CHAPTER SIX

BY THE time Nicolas got downstairs he was back to being the man most people knew him to be. He entered the study to find it a veritable Aladdin’s cave of hi-tech equipment. Toni, the two policemen, two men he did not recognise but knew came from some special services department—all of them stood or sat about messing with the complicated array of communications stuff.

Stone-faced, hard-eyed, he homed directly in on Toni.

Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash did Toni’s face reveal what he must be thinking, knowing how long Nicolas had been with Sara. ‘Almost time,’ he said quietly. ‘Everything is ready.’

Nicolas gave a curt nod and moved over to the desk. The others in the room watched him like wary cats following the hunting pace of a dangerous animal. They were split into three groups—one group tracing, one group talking, one man ready to hit a command the moment they were given the go-ahead.

He sat down. ‘Any problems?’ he clipped.

‘No.’ It was Toni who answered. ‘We have them pinned down to a certain area code, but to be sure this works we need more time.’

‘It has to work,’ Nicolas said grimly. ‘Failure means panic and panic means risk. I won’t have the child’s life put at risk—you understand?’ It wasn’t said to Toni but to the two special agents huddled in a corner across the room.

The phone on the desk began to ring. The room froze into total stillness. Nicolas sat very still in his chair, hands tense, eyes fixed on the two policemen. And waited.

Two rings. Three rings. It seemed an age. Four. He got the nod. He snatched up the phone. ‘Santino,’ he announced.

‘Ah, good evening, signore.’ The smooth, oily voice slid snake-like into every headphoned ear listening in. ‘You have resolved the small cash-flow problem, I hope …’

Dawn was just breaking the sky when Nicolas entered Sara’s room and gently shook her awake.

She sat up with a jerk. ‘What’s happened?’ she gasped, instantly alert, her eyes huge and frightened in her sleep-flushed face.

‘It’s over, cara,’ he murmured soothingly. ‘Your daughter is safe.’

‘Safe?’ She blinked up at him, not really taking the words in. ‘Safe, Nicolas?’ she repeated. ‘Really safe?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded.

‘Oh, God.’ Her hand whipped up to cover her wobbling mouth, her eyes, still badly bruised with the strain of it all, going luminous with tears of relief. ‘How …?’ she whispered. ‘Where is she?’

‘I will take you to her just as soon as you can get dressed and be ready to travel,’ he promised.

‘She’s not here?’ Then in a burst of alarm she cried, ‘Have they h-hurt her?’

‘No, to both questions,’ he answered calmingly. ‘Here—’ He turned away, then turned back to push a cup of something hot into her hand. ‘Drink this, then get dressed. I would like to leave here in half an hour. Can you be ready?’

‘I … Y-yes, of course …’ She was suffering from shock—a new kind of shock, the shock of deliverance from the pits of hell, which stopped her from asking the kind of questions she knew she should be asking.

‘Good.’ He nodded, then, turning, went quickly towards the door.

‘Nic!’ She stopped him, waiting for him to turn back to face her before saying huskily, ‘Thank you.’

After what had happened between them the night before, there was a certain amount of irony in that. But he took it at its face value, his half-nod an acknowledgement before he was turning away again.

‘Downstairs in half an hour,’ he instructed, and left her alone.