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

It was quietly spoken, almost conversationally so, yet there was not a person in the room who did not understand the command or whom it was aimed directly at. Indifferent to them all, unmoving, he remained directly in front of Sara’s bowed head while he waited in silence for his instruction to be carried out.

And they jolted into action, responding like mechanical toys, heads, bodies, limbs jerking with a complete lack of coordination that shifted them en masse towards the door. Two policemen, both in plain clothes. One uniformed chauffeur, hat gone, hair mussed, face white. One weepy young nanny with her face buried in a handkerchief. A harried-looking housekeeper and her grim-faced man-of-all-trades husband. And the doctor who had been called out to treat the young nanny and had ended up staying because he had been seriously concerned that Sara was ready to collapse.

Or maybe because he had been ordered to stay by this man.

Who knew—who cared? Sara didn’t. He might be able to make other people quail in their shoes. He might be able to command mute obedience from anyone who came within his despotic reach. But not her. Never her! And she found it amazing if not pathetic that one man could walk in somewhere and command that kind of sheep-like obedience without even having to give his name.

But then, this one man was not just any man. This was a man who wielded such power that he could walk into any room anywhere in the world and command immediate attention. The same man who had had this house and its beautiful grounds locked up like a fortress within an hour of the incident happening.

It was a shame he had not had the foresight to do it before it had happened. Then this unwelcome meeting between them would not have needed to take place.

The last one out drew the door shut behind them. Sara heard it close with a gentle click, and felt the new silence settle around her like a shroud.

He moved away, coming back moments later to sit down beside her. The next thing, a glass was being pressed to her bloodless mouth.

‘Drink,’ he commanded.

The distinctive smell of brandy invading her nostrils almost made her gag and she shook her head, her waist-length, fine-spun, straight golden hair shimmering against her black-clad shoulders and arms.

He ignored the gesture. ‘Drink,’ he repeated. ‘You look like death,’ he added bluntly. ‘Drink or I shall make you.’

No idle threat. That became clear when his hand came up, his long, strong, blunt-ended fingers taking a grip on her chin so he could force her mouth open.

She drank—then gasped as the liquid slid like fire down her paper-dry throat, the air sucking frantically into her lungs as though it had been trying to do that for hours now without any success.

‘That’s better,’ he murmured, believing it was the brandy that had made her gasp like that when in actual fact it had been his touch—his touch acting like an electric charge to her system, shooting stinging shocks of recognition into every corner of her frozen flesh. ‘Now drink some more.’

She drank, if only to hide the new horror that was attacking her. Him. This man. The bitter fact that she could still respond so violently to physical contact with this—person who had caused her so much pain and disillusionment and grief.

He made her take several sips at the brandy before deciding she’d had enough. His fingers let go. The glass was removed. By then the brandy had put some colour back into her cheeks—and his touch a glint of bitter condemnation into the blue eyes she managed to lift to his.

‘Is this your doing?’ she demanded, the words barely distinguishable as they scraped across her tense throat.

But he heard—and understood. The hardening of the eyes told her so. Eyes that continued to view her with a cold but steady scrutiny which quite efficiently gave her a reply.

He was denying it, using his eyes to demand how she dared suspect him of such a terrible thing.

But she did suspect him. ‘I hate you,’ she said. ‘I despise the very ground you occupy. If anything happens to my baby then watch your back, Nicolas,’ she warned him. ‘Because I’ll be there with a knife long enough to slice right through that piece of cold rock you may call a heart.’

He didn’t respond, didn’t react, which came as a surprise because his overgrown sense of self did not take kindly to threats. And she’d meant it—every single huskily spoken, virulent word.

‘Tell me what happened,’ he instructed quietly instead.

Her mind went hot at the bright, burning flashback to the young nanny stumbling through the door. ‘Lia has been kidnapped!’ she had screamed in outright hysteria. ‘They just ran up and snatched her while we were playing in the park!’

The memory launched her with a bone-crunching jerk to her feet, turning her from a wax-like dummy into a shivering, shaking mass of anguish. ‘You know what happened, you evil monster!’ she seared at him. Blue eyes sparked down on him with hatred, with fear, with a bitter, filthy contempt. ‘She was your one humiliation so you’ve had her removed, haven’t you—haven’t you?’

By contrast the golden eyes remained calm, unaffected. He sat back, crossed one neat ankle over a beautifully clad knee, stretched a silk-clad arm across the back of the sofa and studied her quivering frame quite detachedly.

‘I did not take your child,’ he stated.

Not his child, she noted. Not even our child. Her shaking mouth compressed into a line of disgust. ‘Yes, you did.’ She said it without a hint of uncertainty. ‘It bears all the hallmarks of one of your lot.’ Not said nicely and not meant to be. ‘Vendetta is your middle name. Or should be. The only thing I don’t understand is why I wasn’t taken out at the same time.’

‘Work on it,’ he suggested. ‘You may, with a bit of luck, come up with a half-intelligent answer.’

She turned away, hating to look at him, hating that look of cruel indifference on his arrogant face. This was their daughter’s life they were discussing here! And he could sit there looking like—that!

‘God, you make me sick,’ she breathed, moving away, arms wrapping around her tense body as she went to stand by the window, gazing out on the veritable wall of security now cordoning off the property: men with mobile telephones fastened to their ears, some with big, ugly-looking dogs on strong-looking leashes. A laugh broke from her, thick with scorn. ‘Putting on a show for the punters,’ she derided. ‘Do you honestly think anyone will be fooled by it?’

‘Not you, obviously!’ He didn’t even try to misunderstand what she was talking about, his mockery as dry as her derision. ‘They are there to keep the media at bay,’ he then flatly explained. ‘That foolish nanny was supposed to be trained on how to respond to this kind of contingency. Instead she stood in the park screaming so loud that she brought half of London out to find out what was the matter.’ His sigh showed the first hint of anger. ‘Now the whole world knows that the child has been taken. Which is going to really make it simple to get her back with the minimum of fuss!’

‘Oh, God.’ Sara’s hand went up to cover her mouth, panic suddenly clawing at her again. ‘Why, Nicolas?’ she cried in wretched despair. ‘She’s only two years old! She was no threat to you! Why did you take my baby away?’

She didn’t see him move, yet he was at her side in an instant, his fingers burning that damned electrical charge into her flesh as he spun her around to face him. ‘I won’t repeat this again,’ he clipped. ‘So listen well. I did not take your child.’

‘S-someone did,’ she choked, blue eyes luminous with bulging tears. ‘Who else do you know who hated her enough to do that?’

He sighed again, not answering that one—not answering because he couldn’t deny her accusation. ‘Come and sit down again before you drop,’ he suggested. ‘And we will—’

‘I don’t want to sit down!’ she angrily refused. ‘And I don’t want you touching me!’ Violently, she wrenched free of his grasp.

His mouth tightened, a sign that at last her manner towards him was beginning to get through his thick skin. ‘Who else, Nicolas?’ she repeated starkly. ‘Who else would want to take my baby from me?’

‘Not from you,’ he said quietly, turning away. ‘They have taken her from me.’

‘You?’ Sara stared at the rigid wall of his back in blank incredulity. ‘But why should they want to do that? You disowned her!’ she cried.

‘But the world does not know that.’

Sara went cold. Stone-still, icy cold as realisation slapped her full in the face. ‘You mean—?’ She swallowed, having to battle to rise above a new kind of fear suddenly clutching at her breast. She had banked on this being his doing. Banked on it so much that it came as a desperate blow to have him place an alternative in her mind.

‘I am a powerful man.’ He stated the unarguable. ‘Power brings its own enemies—’

But— ‘No.’ She was shaking her head in denial even before he’d finished speaking. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘This is family stuff. I know it is. I spoke to them on the—’

‘You spoke to them?’ He turned, those predator’s eyes suddenly razor-like with surprise.

‘On the phone.’ She nodded, swallowing as the terrible sickness she had experienced during that dreadful call came back to torment her.

‘When?’ His voice had roughened, hardened. He didn’t like it that she had been able to tell him something he had not been told already. It pricked his insufferable belief that he was omnipotent, the man who knew everything. ‘When did this telephone conversation take place?’

‘A-about an hour after they t-took her,’ she whispered, then added bitterly, ‘They said you would know what to do!’ She stared at him in despair, her summer-blue eyes suddenly turned into dark, dark pools in an agonised face. ‘Well, do it, Nicolas!’ she cried. ‘For God’s sake do it!’

He muttered a violent curse, and was suddenly at her side again, hard fingers coiling around her slender arm, brooking no protest this time as he pushed her back into the sofa.

‘Now listen …’ he said, coming to sit down beside her. ‘I need to know what they said to you, Sara. And I need to know how they said it. You understand?’

Understand? Of course she understood! ‘You want to know if they were Sicilian,’ she choked. ‘Well, yes! They were Sicilian—like you!’ she said accusingly. ‘I recognised the accent, the same blinding contempt for anything and anyone who is not of the same breed!’