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

CHAPTER EIGHT

SARA was squatting by the cultivated border of one of the many white-painted terrace walls, carefully coaxing bougainvillea strands around a wire support that she had just constructed, secure in the knowledge that she could hear Lia’s happy voice drifting up to her from where she played on the beach with Fabia, when an electric whirring sound behind her warned her of Alfredo’s approach.

She didn’t turn, did not so much as reveal she was aware of his presence. But her inner sigh was heavy. In the six days since she had arrived here, she had carefully avoided any contact at all with Alfredo. He came to see Lia each lunchtime, guiding his chair into the suite and staying long enough to share lunch with the baby, and Sara made herself distinctly scarce before he was due to arrive.

It was necessary for them to stay here, Nicolas had said. But necessary to whom? To this man in the wheelchair coming steadily towards her along the terrace? Of course it was.

It certainly wasn’t what Nicolas wanted, she thought bleakly, because she hadn’t even seen him since the first night she’d arrived here.

He had had his talk with Fabia, their two voices conversing in the quick Sicilian dialect Sara had never quite been able to keep up with even before her Italian had become rusty through lack of use.

When he’d come out of the bedroom again, he hadn’t even bothered to wish her goodnight, but had just left.

She hadn’t seen him since. The next morning she’d awoken to Fabia arriving with a manservant in tow carrying some heavy suitcases. They’d contained all her personal belongings. Nicolas must have had them flown in overnight from London. A further statement that this was to be a permanent situation. Fabia had also brought a message from Nicholas informing her that he’d had to fly back to New York.

He had been gone for almost a week now, and she refused point-blank to admit—even to herself—that she missed him.

The wheelchair stopped a couple of feet away. Sara felt his eyes on her, sensed him urging her to turn and acknowledge him. When she did not, it was he who broke the tense silence between them.

‘The garden has missed your special touch,’ he said.

‘I have nothing to say to you, Alfredo,’ she told him without pausing in what she was doing. ‘You are a mean, nasty, selfish old man who doesn’t deserve my attention. Or the attention of my daughter, come to that.’

Instead of taking exception to her outright attack on him, she was surprised to hear him give a soft chuckle. ‘I would say that constituted saying a lot,’ he remarked ruefully.

It made her turn, more out of suspicion than because she had been taken by surprise by his amiable tone. She was quite sure Alfredo could chuckle as pleasantly as that while thrusting a knife between her shoulderblades!

Still, this first real look at him without her being blinded by the horror of seeing her daughter clasped to his chest was a shock.

Dressed in a cream short-sleeved shirt open at the throat and a pair of brown trousers, he was still a remarkably daunting person—remarkable because he had been so drastically diminished in the purely physical sense.

Never anywhere near as tall as his son, he had once made up for his lack of inches with width. Wide shoulders, wide chest, wide hips, short, immovable trunks for legs—all of it solid-packed and tough. But now the width had gone, the muscle waste so dramatic that it had left behind it a mere shadow of what once had been, replacing it with a frailty so obvious that Sara began to understand why Nicolas was so angrily protective of what pathetic amount was left.

The sun was shining down on his silvered head—the hair was not thinning, she noted. At least he had been saved that emasculation. But his skin, though tanned, was sallow and loose, wrinkling his arms and his throat. And there was a lack of strength in the way he sat hunched in his wheelchair, as if the mere act of sitting in it was an effort in itself.

‘Goodness me.’ She sat back on her heels, too stunned to hold back the next comment. ‘You look terrible.’

His answering wry smile was more a fatalistic rueful grimace. ‘I hate it,’ he admitted, and slapped a thin hand on the wheelchair arm. ‘Hate this too.’

I just bet you do, she thought with a moment’s soft pity for this man who used to be a giant despite his lack of inches.

Then he was sending her a look that had all hint of compassion draining right out of her. For this man was still dangerous, physically incapacitated or not. Those two bright hunter’s gold eyes were burning pinpoints of astuteness and guile, warning her that the sharp brain behind them still functioned at its old breakneck pace.

‘You, I see, are more beautiful than ever,’ he remarked. ‘The child is hewn in your image. Your hair, your face, your inherently sweet and gentle nature.’

‘I was a coward, Alfredo,’ Sara countered, ignoring the attempted compliment. ‘My daughter is not.’

Something she had discovered via listening painfully as Lia had over the last few days let little things slip which suggested that the child had not made it easy for her kidnappers.

‘It will be my son’s genes which give her courage.’ He nodded proudly. ‘Or maybe even my own.’

‘God help her,’ Sara responded, amazed that he wasn’t even going to pretend he did not know exactly who Lia’s father was. ‘If she has much of you in her, Alfredo, then she will need God’s help.’ She fixed him with a hard and cold look. ‘Have you any idea how much you frightened her having her snatched like that?’

‘Me?’ At last he decided to use his striking ability to fake innocence, actually managing to look shocked by the accusation. ‘I did not snatch the bambina!’ he denied. ‘I would not wish to frighten a hair on her beautiful head!’

‘Liar.’ Blue eyes suddenly hot with anger, she stood up and went to lean over him. ‘I saw your expression when you held my baby in your arms! You were glowing with triumph! With everything alive in you, you were staking ownership! Possessive and territorial! I saw it, Alfredo. I saw it!’

It made him gasp, the very fact that she could spit at him like that utterly astounding him. ‘You grow brave in the face of a shrivelled old man in a wheelchair,’ he murmured feebly.

‘Don’t try the poor sick old man routine on me,’ she said scathingly as she straightened away. ‘It just won’t work.’

With that, she bent to pick up her coil of garden wire and secateurs and made to leave.

‘Don’t walk away from me, woman!’ he growled.

Oddly, it stopped her. Not the words themselves but the way he had said them. There was a bitter, biting frustration there—frustration with his physical disadvantage.

She turned back to glance at him just as his fist made furious contact with the wheelchair arm, his face a twisted map of angry helplessness.

‘I did not take the child!’ He scowled mutinously up at her. ‘If I had thought of it, I would have!’ he added bluntly. ‘But I did not!’ Then he sighed heavily because the burst of passionate anger had obviously drained his energy.

Sara saw him go a paler shade of sallow, his eyes lose the vibrant spark of life, and her bottom lip twitched in a spasm of unwanted feeling for this man who was her enemy. She didn’t know whether to believe him, or even if it really mattered that much now that the deed was done. But she could not afford to relax her guard around Alfredo, she reminded herself grimly. Past experience had taught her that lesson the hardest way anyone could learn a lesson in life.

But nor was it in her nature to be cruel to the afflicted, and Alfredo was certainly afflicted at the moment.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked stiffly.

‘Sì,’ he clipped back, but he was leaning heavily on his forearms, his silvered head lowered while he seemed to be concentrating on pacing his breathing.

A child’s laughter drifted up from the small beach below, tinkling around both of them and diverting their attention to the sight of Lia dressed in white cotton dungarees and a white cotton mob-cap pulled on over her hair, running as fast as her little legs could take her, away from Fabia who was chasing with a string of wet seaweed dangling from one hand.

Sara laughed too; she couldn’t help it. Leaning her thighs against the terrace wall, she folded her arms and watched the chase.

Suddenly the wheelchair was right beside her, Alfredo leaning forward as much as he could to follow what was going on.

‘Run, little one. Run!’ he encouraged gruffly, a thin hand making a fist which he used to urge the child further.

It was miraculous. In those few short seconds he had doubled in strength, in life, in sheer vitality. And the chase was lost to Sara as she took all of this in.

A tingling on the back of her neck—that sixth sense at work again, probably—made her turn and look up—up the white-walled terraces, to see Nicolas standing several levels above them, his dark face carved in a mask of pained observation.

Pain not for the child but for the father. Her heart squeezed in her breast. He too had seen the change in Alfredo—perhaps even heard the exchange which had preceded it.

His eyes flicked to her and turned cold—as cold as yellow ice. Yes, he had heard, she realised with a small shiver. Not all of it, but enough. He had warned her not to upset his father. Now retribution was due because she had.

‘Hah!’ said Alfredo, sitting back in his chair with a triumphant laugh. ‘Did you see that?’ He chuckled delightedly, unaware of the other exchange going on. ‘She escaped by ducking right between Fabia’s legs!’

Dragging her eyes from Nicolas’s, she glanced down at the beach where Fabia was now giving chase in the other direction. When she looked up again, Nicolas was gone.