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

And she was, seeing him in all his golden-skinned, sensually sinewed, naked glory.

But for the first time ever she turned away from the invitation his husky words had offered. ‘We’ve been married for almost a year,’ she said. ‘And I can count on the fingers of one hand how many weeks we’ve actually spent together. This isn’t even my home, it’s your father’s!’ she sighed. ‘And on the rare occasions you do find time to come here your father takes priority.’

‘I refuse to pander to your unnatural jealousy of my relationship with my father,’ he clipped.

‘And I hate living here,’ she told him bluntly. ‘And if you can’t be here more than you are then I want to go home, to London. I want to get a job and work to fill my days. I want a life, Nicolas,’ she appealed to his steadily closing face, ‘that doesn’t revolve around couture shops and beauty parlours and feeling the outsider with all these tight-knit, clannish Sicilians!’

‘A life with an Englishman, perhaps.’

She sighed again, irritably this time. ‘This has nothing to do with Jason.’

‘No?’

‘No!’ she denied. ‘It is to do with you and me and a marriage that isn’t a marriage because you aren’t here enough! It’s to do with me being unhappy here!’ Tears, honest tears, filled her eyes at that point; she could see him blur out of focus as she appealed to him to understand. ‘I can’t go on like this—can’t you see? They—your father, your friends—overwhelm me! I’m frightened when you’re not here!’

An appeal from the heart. It should have cut into him, reminded him of the soft, gentle creature he had originally fallen in love with. The one who had been so timid that she used to cling to him when he’d introduced her to someone he knew, or had reached for his hand if they’d crossed the road, or could be tongue-tied by a painful shyness when teased.

But he was Sicilian. And a Sicilian man was by nature territorial and possessive. And if Sara dismissed Jason Castell from her mind as unimportant Nicolas didn’t. Because she hadn’t voiced all of these complaints before the Englishman’s name had begun cropping up in conversations around the island. She hadn’t dared to argue with him like this before the man had come on the scene.

And she had never turned away from the blatant invitation of his body before the Englishman’s appearance.

‘Get into bed,’ he gritted.

‘No.’ She began to quiver at the expression on his face. ‘I w-want to talk this through …’

He began striding around the bed towards her. She backed away, her hands outstretched to ward him off, long, delicately boned fingers trembling. ‘Please don’t,’ she whispered unsteadily. ‘You’re frightening me. I don’t want to be frightened of you too …’

But he wasn’t listening, or maybe didn’t care at that moment that he was about to murder the one firm bit of faith she had—that he, this hard-headed, ruthless hunter she had married, would not, could not hurt her.

He hurt her. Oh, not in the physical sense, but with a hard, ruthless sensuality that left her feeling ravaged to the point of shock. ‘Go near the Englishman and I shall kill you both,’ he then vowed tautly. ‘What’s mine I keep, and you are most definitely mine!’

‘What’s mine I keep …’

He never retracted that vow. Not throughout the following month when she never saw him, never heard from him, never left the villa. She didn’t even hear Alfredo’s mocking little jibes about her failing marriage and his son’s preference for being anywhere but with his pathetic little wife.

She didn’t so much as suspect the neat little trap that Alfredo was setting for her when he delivered a message from Nicolas one evening telling her to meet him in Catania in a hotel they had sometimes stayed in when attending some function in the city.

She arrived at the appointed suite, nervous, a little frightened, praying that he had asked her to come here because he was at last beginning to accept that she was unhappy and they needed to be alone to talk without fear of interruption. She let herself in with the provided key, took the overnight bag Nicolas had told her to bring with her through to the bedroom, then went back into the sitting room to wait.

He didn’t come. By ten o’clock she was feeling let down and angry. By eleven she’d grimly got ready for bed. By twelve she was trying hard to fall asleep when she heard another key in the door. Elation sent her scrambling in her lovely cream silk nightdress out of the bed and towards the bedroom door just as it opened inwards.

Then came the shock, the horror, the confusion, because it wasn’t Nicolas who came through the door but Jason. Jason, who paused in the open doorway, smiled, and murmured, ‘Sara, darling, you look exquisite—as always.’

Blank incomprehension held her stunned and silent. He stepped closer, pulling her into his arms and she let him do it, utterly incapable of working out how to deal with the situation.

A mistake, she was thinking stupidly. Jason had somehow made a terrible, terrible mistake!

A hand landing hard against its wood sent the door flying open. And then Nicolas stood there. Nicolas, with his face turned to rock. Nicolas, who stared at her with his hunter’s gold eyes turned yellow with shock while she stared helplessly back, the frissons of confusion, alarm, horror and shock wild inside her.

‘So my father was right. You bitch,’ he said. That was all.

Guilty as charged. Her silence damned her. Her blushing cheeks damned her. The way Jason made a lurching dive for the balcony doors and disappeared through them to go she neither knew nor cared where damned her. And the sheer silk nightdress bought especially for this meeting and which showed every contour of her slender body beneath damned her.

He still didn’t move and neither could she. Her mind was rocketing through all the reasons why Jason could have come here believing that she was waiting for him. Then it hit her, and she went white—not with shame but with fury.

Alfredo. Alfredo had set her up—set this up! Alfredo.

‘Nic—please!’ Her blue eyes were slightly wild and begging. ‘This isn’t what you—’

He took a step towards her, his face turning from rock to murderous threat. His hand came up, the back of it aimed to lash out at her.

‘No!’ she cried, instinctively cowering away, long hair flying in a wild arc as her arms came up to protect her face.

It stopped him; seeing her cower like that did manage to stop him. ‘For God’s sake!’ she pleaded, wretchedly from behind her protecting hands. ‘You must listen to me!’

‘Never,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘You no longer exist.’

He meant it. She could see in the glacial gold of his eyes that he meant it. It was too much. She fainted at his feet. When she came round she was alone, lying where he had left her.

She hadn’t so much as spoken to him again until today. She had not been allowed back in the villa. And that same hotel suite had become her prison for the next few terrible days until Toni, cold-eyed and uncommunicative, had come to personally escort her off the island and back to London.

Wretched with despair and weak with nervous reaction, she’d done as she was told, come here to this house, sat here in this house for weeks—weeks waiting for him to calm down, see sense, realise that she, of all people, could never do such a wicked thing as to take another lover.

Then she’d discovered she was pregnant, and everything had changed. She’d tried phoning him; he’d refused to take her calls. She’d tried writing to him; he hadn’t acknowledged her letters. In the end she’d turned to Toni for help, called him on the phone and begged him—begged him to persuade Nicolas to see her, listen to what she had to say! ‘I’m going to have his baby, Toni!’ Even now, three years on, she could still hear the anguish in her voice. ‘Surely that must mean something to him!’

It hadn’t. The next day the phone had rung. It was Toni.

‘He says you lie,’ he informed her coldly. ‘The child you carry cannot be his. You may have the use of the house you are in at present.’ He went on in that same icy vein. ‘Everything you and the child may need will be provided so long as you remain there and say nothing of your betrayal.’

‘If he feels like that, then why doesn’t he just throw me out on the street and divorce me?’ she sliced back bitterly, hurt and angered by the injustice of it all.

‘You have humiliated him enough without the added scandal of a divorce,’ he clipped. ‘But hear this,’ he then warned icily. ‘Let another man near you and he will kill you both; make no mistake about that.’

Did that mean Jason already lay dead somewhere in Sicily? she wondered, and found she couldn’t care less. Jason had to have been in cahoots with Alfredo. It had not taken her long to work that one out. And for that he deserved anything Nicolas might have decided to deal out to him. It was only a shame that Alfredo would not be getting his due for his part in it all.

But maybe Alfredo had got what was due to him, she now thought as she slowly returned to the present. Because in his determination to get rid of the woman he saw as an unfit wife for his son he had lost the right to love one of the most wonderful creatures ever placed on this earth: Lia. Was he ever curious? she wondered. Did he ever just sit and wonder about his son’s child who was also his grandchild? Did he ever suffer from pangs of regret?

She hoped he did. She really hoped that, sick man or not now, he suffered daily from bitter, bitter regrets.

And that, she acknowledged grimly, was her own desire for vengeance rearing its ugly head.

A movement just behind her in the doorway made her turn to find herself captured by Toni’s narrowed, watchful eyes. And for a moment—a brief but stinging moment—she had a feeling he knew exactly what she had been thinking.

Then the connection was broken because Nicolas heard them and turned around. But all through dinner she felt Toni’s eyes on her, and stung with the uncomfortable feeling that he had sensed her thirst for revenge.

He was Sicilian. And Sicilians claimed exclusive rights on vendettas. He would not take kindly to the idea of a mere English woman encroaching on those rights. Especially against a fellow Sicilian.

The meal was an ordeal. Sara forced down a couple of small bites of the braised chicken placed in front of her but other than that could swallow nothing. Nicolas and Toni ate with her, their occasional bursts of conversation to do with some business deal they were presently involved in. But these exchanges were brief, and largely they respected her desire to keep silent.