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

She was showered, dressed and ready to leave by the specified time. Nicolas was waiting for her in the hallway. He watched her come down the stairs towards him, his eyes drifting over the simple lines of the sage-green linen trousers and cream shirt she was wearing beneath an off-white jacket. She wore no make-up—she rarely ever did. And her hair she had brushed quickly and secured back from her face with a padded green band.

Nothing fancy. Nothing couture. Like the Sara he had first met. She had reverted to that person of simple tastes the moment he’d had her banished here to his London residence. She wondered if he was making the same distinction as he watched her like that, unrevealingly, with his eyes narrowed, so that she could not read what was going on behind them. But she made no apology for her appearance. This was what she was. That other person had been fashioned like a piece of sculpture to suit the role it had been intended to play. A false role, fake like the life she had been forced to live and the marriage that should never have been.

He, by contrast, looked dynamic again, not in one of his handmade silk suits but a pair of tobacco-coloured linen trousers and a white roll-neck worn beneath a black linen jacket—Armani, she guessed, recalling that his casual wardrobe had held mainly that designer’s name.

‘Where’s Toni?’ she enquired as he led the way outside into an early summer morning.

‘He has business of mine to attend to,’ he answered coolly, opening the rear door of the Mercedes saloon standing with its engine running at the bottom of the steps.

She smiled to herself as she climbed into the car. Problem solved, so Toni’s attention had been turned back to business. Then she wondered how long she was to be graced with Nicolas’s company before he turned his attention to other things.

For the duration of this drive? she suggested to herself as the car took off with Nicolas seated beside her and the driver safely hidden behind a wall of tinted glass. Until he had efficiently delivered Lia into her arms? Or would he feel duty-bound to see them safely back home again and maybe even hang around long enough to make sure that the security surrounding them was tight enough for something like this not to happen again?

She shivered, the mere idea of it occurring again striking like a death knell right through her. ‘How far away is she?’ she asked. ‘Will it take long to get there?’

His dark head had been resting against the soft, creamy leather headrest, his eyes closed. But when she turned the questions on him his long lashes flickered then lifted slowly to reveal sensually sleepy pupils surrounded by a sandstorm of energy. It caught at her breath, because that look was his sexually hungry male look and—

No. She glanced away, refusing to so much as think of him in that dangerous mould. Not after last night. Never again after last night! And anyway, how could he be looking at her like that after what he had said?

‘Quite far,’ he murmured, answering his first question. ‘A plane journey actually. She is in Sicily,’ he finally tagged on.

‘Sicily?’ The shock of it showed in the momentary blank blue look she fixed on him. ‘But how could she be in Sicily?’

‘With good planning,’ he drawled. ‘How else?’

She shivered. Her baby had been taken so far away from her and she had been helpless to stop it. ‘But I’ve not brought anything with me for a journey this long! No change of clothes for me, or for Lia. And my passport, Nicolas.’ She turned to him urgently. ‘I haven’t brought my passport with me—’

‘I have it,’ he said. ‘I recovered it from the wall-safe. Packed for you too,’ he added wryly, because it wasn’t a job he was used to doing for anyone, not even himself. ‘For both you and the child while you were still sleeping.’

He had been in her room? Walking around it, packing for her while she slept? The very idea did the strangest things to her, filled her with alarm and a shocking sense of—

‘You opened my safe?’ she protested, picking on that one intrusion because the other did not bear thinking about.

‘My safe,’ he corrected her. ‘My home.’

But she ignored the jibe because another thought had suddenly struck her, one that held the breath trapped in her lungs. ‘Where is she in Sicily?’ she asked.

There was a small hesitation. Then, ‘With my father,’ he said, watching her narrowly.

Alfredo. She stiffened, all her muscles clenching. ‘After all you said,’ she breathed. ‘He was behind it all, wasn’t he? He’s the one who did this to me!’

‘Not to your child, I make note,’ he drily observed. ‘I can at least take comfort in the fact that you are not accusing my father of wanting to hurt a child.’

Her blue eyes flashed in a bitter contradiction of that final remark. ‘If he has hurt her,’ she warned, ‘so help me, wheelchair or not, I shall see him dead.’

‘A Sicilian emotion,’ he noted, ‘this desire you have developed for retribution. Do you think we may have taught you something after all?’

His lazy mockery was spiked, the glinting eyes full of a cold condescension entirely aimed at previous diatribes in which she had condemned everything Sicilian. ‘You people taught me many things, Nicolas,’ she threw back at him. ‘Not least the rule of possession. “What’s mine I keep”!’ she quoted. ‘And woe betide anyone who tries to lay a finger on a possession of mine, including your wonderful father, who is nothing but a—’

‘Stop right there,’ he inserted very softly.

She sucked in a breath of air, her heartbeat pounding in her head. But it was no use. The fact that he had actually managed to convince her that Alfredo had nothing to do with Lia’s abduction only made this moment of truth more impossible to deal with.

‘And you still protect him, don’t you?’ she derided bitterly. ‘No matter how many dirty tricks he pulls on you, you still refuse to see what a nasty, cunning, evil man he is—even when the proof of it is shoved right under your very—’

His hand snaking round her neck and yanking her forcefully towards him stopped the words. ‘Hold your tongue, you little shrew!’ he rasped. ‘Before I bite it off!’

‘I hate and despise you!’ she threw into his angry face.

‘You were warned,’ he muttered, and crushed his mouth down onto hers in a brutal kiss aimed at subduing all hint of defiance left in her.

Yet within the punishment was a dark, duplicitous intimacy that dragged pleasurably at her senses and took some fighting against to stop her from sinking greedily into the kiss.

She groaned instead, pretending he had hurt her.

‘You asked for it,’ he muttered as he drew away.

‘I got it, didn’t I?’ she muttered in return, pulling shakily out of his arms.

‘What surprises me,’ he struck back cruelly, his hand shooting out to capture her wrist then holding onto it so they could both feel the way the blood was breaking speed records as it thundered through her veins, ‘is how you were affected by it. Could it be that you’re just a little in need of a man, Sara? Has the princess been locked up in her tower too long, and did last night’s little—taster remind her of what she once craved?’

‘Can you be so sure the tower has been locked?’ she retaliated, refusing point-blank to let him diminish her as he used to so easily.

His eyes glinted. ‘You’re damned right I can,’ he gritted. ‘I’ve told you before: what’s mine I keep. And I’ve kept you under surveillance enough to be sure no man has been near you.’

‘Except for my gaoler,’ she threw back at him deridingly. ‘In the end even you—hate yourself though you do for it—couldn’t keep your hands off me.’

‘I have the legal right,’ he declared. ‘If not the moral one.’

‘And the princess in the tower had the cunning to let down her hair for her secret lover to climb,’ she hit back, reminding him of the old fairytale.

His eyes narrowed. She held her breath, aware that she was prodding a very temperamental animal here yet, strangely, unable to stop herself—finding it exhilarating almost.

Then, deflatingly, he dropped her wrist and relaxed. ‘You have changed,’ he observed. ‘You would not have dared speak to me like this three years ago.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed, subsiding angrily into the far corner of the seat. ‘I’ve changed. Grown up. Grown tough. What did you expect me to do, Nicolas?’ She flashed him a bitter look. ‘Remain the same gullible fool I was when I first met you? The one who thought you loved me above all others and would stand by me whatever was thrown at me?’

‘You were the one who took a lover to your bed,’ he reminded her. ‘Not I!’

‘And you were the one who threw me to the hungry wolves then dared to be disgusted with me when I cried to you for help!’

He threw her a contemptuous look, the disgust as clear in his eyes now as it had been three years ago. ‘I notice you don’t deny the charge of adultery,’ he jeered.

‘What’s the use,’ she asked, ‘when you refuse to believe me?’

‘Believe what?’ he derided. ‘Your lies?’

‘I never lied to you,’ she asserted.