Sandro was a man on a mission. A man aiming to make an immediate impact before he even opened his tight-lipped mouth. Every inch of him screamed Italian, from the arrogant way he had slicked back his jet-black hair to the unblemished shine on his black leather shoes.
He also screamed power. He screamed danger.
‘W-what are you going to do?’ she asked breathlessly.
At first he didn’t answer, his lean face closed up as tight as a drum, eyes as hard as iron, mouth like steel, so deeply sunk into his chosen persona that her heart began to quail in her trembling breast.
‘Pay your debt for you,’ he clipped out.
Pay the debt or kill the lender? she found herself extending nervously, and almost laughed—not with amusement, but in sheer nervous response to the strange kind of sensual arousal that was suddenly tugging at the lining in her abdomen. The whole thing—Sandro, how he looked and what she was experiencing because of that look—was disturbing her in ways she could barely cope with.
‘You—you’re not going there to start trouble are you, Sandro?’ she questioned cautiously. ‘He—he has bouncers with him all the time. Big guys who don’t mind h-hitting instead of listening.’
‘And you are concerned that I cannot take care of myself?’ It was mockery, hard and spiked.
Her tongue ran an unsteady track around her paperdry lips as she sent her gaze skittering over that lean tight body locked inside those beautiful clothes.
‘Th-they’ll eat you for breakfast,’ she told him flatly.
He laughed, not in the least disturbed by her opinion. ‘They will not lay a single finger on me, cara, be sure of it.’
Because he was taking this man Luca with him, and two of his security guards? He must be mad or just plain arrogant if he truly believed that.
‘I’m coming with you.’ At least she knew these people, was even on friendly terms with some of them. They would listen to her before using their fists. But with Sandro in this mood, in this fighteningly provoking guise... She shuddered, glancing distractedly around the room for her bag, only to remember annoyingly that she had left it with her coat downstairs in Sandro’s office. ‘I left my bag and coat in your...’
‘You will remain right here.’
Voice soft, dripping ice; that was all he needed to say to bring her scrambling mind into full focus. Spinning back to face him, Joanna found those iron-hard eyes fixed on her for the first time since he’d entered the room, and suddenly the tension sizzling between them was enough to fill her with a spine-tingling sense of dread.
‘Sandro—please don’t do this!’ she pleaded, wringing her hands in front of her. ‘I know these people! I can deal with them. I don’t want you to be hurt!’ she concluded shrilly.
He didn’t bother to deign to give all of that a reply, but simply strode to the lift, tapped the call button with a leather-coated finger, watched the doors slide obediently open, then stepped firmly inside.
The doors closed. Joanna stood there staring at them, feeling angry and frustrated and useless and wretched—so damned wretched that her eyes filled with hot aching tears.
He was gone for over two hours, and in that time she worried herself into a nervous frazzle. She paced the floor. She tried out each chair, only to find she couldn’t sit still in any of them. She even found the will to face the horrors of a lift journey, after a sudden decision to go and collect her bag from downstairs and then go after him.
But when she pressed the lift call button nothing happened. The ruthless swine must have disabled it so it could not leave here!
By the time he reappeared she was locked into a state of brittle high anxiety, sitting in a chair, shoes off, knees tucked up beneath her chin, arms hugging them tightly.
But her knees dropped and her spine straightened as her anxious eyes quickly checked him over from the top of his slick-styled head to the tips of his shining shoes. The overcoat had gone, the gloves and scarf, but there was no sign of any physical damage, she noted with a sinking sense of relief. No cuts or bruises, except the ones on his fist he had caused to himself earlier.
‘Your receipt,’ he drawled, dropping a flimsy scrap of paper down on her lap.
He moved away immediately, going over to the drinks cabinet where he helped himself to what looked like a neat whisky.
Helplessly her eyes lingered on him, then slowly dropped to the piece of paper. ‘Joanna Preston,’ it said. ‘£5,000 paid in full.’ And Arthur Bates’ signature was scrawled beneath.
‘You don’t even use my surname,’ Sandro remarked, his back to her.
She didn’t use his name because she had never felt she’d earned the right to use it, but to say that out loud was the surest way to bring other, much more unpalatable subjects lurking out into the open. So she kept her eyes lowered, bit down into her tremulous bottom lip and said nothing.
He turned, glass in hand, then simply stood there looking at her for what seemed like an age, until she couldn’t stand it any longer and glanced up warily. ‘Thank you for this,’ she said, fingers fluttering across the receipt.
He made no comment; there was no expression in those lean dark smoothly sculptured features. She knew he was angry, knew he felt like spitting nails at someone—preferably her, she ruefully accepted. But for some reason he was keeping it all firmly dampened down inside him.
‘That place was the pits,’ he said.
Not that dampened down, she noted, and she flushed, looking quickly away from him again.
‘At least when you waited in a restaurant there was some dignity to it,’ he went on grimly. ‘But that place was an insult to yourself, Joanna. Why did you go there?’
She shrugged and refused to answer. What was the use? He wouldn’t understand it if she tried to explain it to him. After all, what did a man like Alessandro Bonetti know about having nothing, or being nothing, either to yourself or to others.
He could stand there in his smart suit of clothes, that most probably had cost twice as much as the five-thousand-pound debt he had just discharged for her, looking down his classical Roman nose at her, as if the insult she’d given herself had also rubbed off on him. If that was the case, then he should be grateful that she had not used the Bonetti name!
‘Well, that side of your life is now over,’ he suddenly decreed. ‘So we will not speak of it again.’
Subject closed. Joanna lifted her head to stare at him, refusing to believe what she was really hearing—what she had a horrible feeling she was hearing threaded between the actual spoken words.
‘I’m not going to live with you again, Sandro,’ she said, coming stiffly to her feet.
‘No?’ he challenged, and folded his elegant arms across his equally elegant chest. ‘Then where are you going to live?’ he enquired, so smoothly that she sensed the trap even as she walked herself right into it.
‘I still have my flat,’ she declared. ‘I will find myself another job easily enough!’
He didn’t say a damned single word, but Joanna knew, even as he then unfolded his arms and began walking towards her, that her world was about to come tumbling down right into Sandro’s waiting clutches.
Dipping a hand into his jacket pocket, he slid it out again so smoothly that she almost missed the fact that he had collected something as he moved. Then she saw it, and sure enough, everything came clattering down on top of her.
She fell back into the chair, her eyes fixed and staring. ‘W-where did you get that?’ she gasped.
‘Where do you think?’ he drawled, and dropped the tiny photo frame onto her lap before moving away again, leaving her to stare down at her sister’s sweetly smiling face and come to terms in her own time with what it meant for him to be in possession of it.
‘I have stored most of your things at the house in Belgravia,’ he continued quite casually. ‘But I did bring a few essentials back here with me...’
Lifting her shock-darkened eyes, she watched him stroll into the lift, only to come out again almost instant
ly. He was carrying a suitcase—one of her own suitcases, she recognised—which he stood against the wall. Then he smoothly straightened.
‘Y-you’ve been in my flat!’ She gasped out the obvious.
He nodded. ‘Been in it, been appalled by it. Been so damned angry as I stood there in the middle of it, seeing how my wife—my wife!’ he repeated angrily, ‘was living! Here...’ Striding back to her, he calmly added her bag to the growing stack of possessions he seemed hell-bent on piling on her.
And each one sent its own message, she realised mutely. The receipt for the money, which told her she was now in his debt. Molly’s picture frame taken from her bedside table, which told her he had been to her flat. Now her bag, which was telling her exactly how he had found and gained access to the flat in the first place.
And don’t forget the suitcase, she told herself grimly. Your own suitcase, personally packed by this man, which is telling you clearly that he has gone through all your personal things like a robber!
‘I can’t believe you’ve actually done this!’ she choked out shakily.
‘Done it,’ he confirmed, ‘and finished it,’ he added. ‘There is not a loose end left to be tied as far as I can tell. Your flat has been emptied, your lease has been closed, your job terminated and your debts paid. Did I miss anything?’ he enquired with an acid innocence that did not hide the burning antagonism beneath the surface of his calm demeanour. ‘Ah, yes,’ he drawled, bringing those elegantly clad legs in her direction while all she could do was sit there and look at him, too totally, mind numbingly stunned to do much more than blankly watch his approach.
Coming to lean right over her, he braced his hands on the arms of her chair so she was quite effectively pinned where she sat.
‘There is you,’ he said, eyes hard, expression tight. In fact, he was so locked into his role of macho intimidator that he didn’t even seem to care that he was seriously frightening her. ‘You, Signora Bonetti,’ he murmured, using the name like a dire threat, ‘are about to begin the first day of your new life.’
‘I don’t know w-what you think you are talking about,’ she stammered, shifting nervously back in the chair as his face came ever closer.
‘No?’ he quizzed. ‘Then let me explain it to you. Because this is the deal, cara. No bartering, no haggling. I have paid your five-thousand-pound debt for you. I have sorted out your life for you. And in return you, my dear wife, are going to start being a wife to me!’
‘I can’t believe you’re even saying this!’ she spat into his determined face. ‘It makes you no better than Arthur Bates—can’t you see that?’
She shouldn’t have said that, she accepted warily, when she saw the kind of sneer that tugged an ugly line into his beautifully moulded mouth. ‘Oh, surely I am the much better option, cara,’ he contended softly. ‘Even you, with your distorted view of the whole male race in general, must be able to appreciate that!’
Appreciate it? Of course she could appreciate it! Did he think she was blind as well as stupid? But appreciating what Sandro undoubtedly was by comparison to every other man she’d known—never mind the awful Arthur Bates!—did not alter the fact that she could not let him do this to her. Could not let him do it to himself.
Not again. She shuddered. Never again.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered, her voice shaking on the wicked lie. ‘You can’t possibly want to live with a woman who can’t so much as stand you touching her!’
That should have sent him into recoil—she had said it to make him do exactly that. But Sandro seemed to have some hidden agenda of his own here, because instead of recoiling, to her consternation he laughed.
‘Hate?’ he mocked. ‘Can’t stand me touching you? You have been hungrily eating me up with your eyes ever since you set foot into my building!’ he accused.
‘That’s a lie!’ she denied.
‘A lie?’ His hard mouth curved upwards, without actually smiling. ‘Well, let us just see, shall we?’
And, with no more warning than that, he took hold of her arms and pulled her to her feet as panic came back to envelop her. She hit out at him with her closed fists, imprisoned arms struggling to break free from his grasp.
‘So wild,’ he muttered, fielding her blows by capturing her wrists and using them to pull her hard up against him. ‘So very wild when protecting that precious virtue you hang onto so tenaciously!’
Her mind went white—a complete white wipe-out of bright, blinding pain that had her fighting all the harder to get free. Pulling, pushing, kicking, scratching. ‘Let me go!’ she choked, trying uselessly to twist her captured wrists free.
‘Never,’ he declared. ‘You are back with me now. And this time I will make sure you stay!’
Then his dark head was lowering, his parted mouth angling across her own tensely held lips, his arms coming around her, imprisoning her, holding her trapped by the one thing she feared the most.
The power of his kiss.
It was like being tossed back through dark lonely chasms to a time when she’d barely existed between moments like this.
Sandro—Sandro—filling her mind, her heart, her body with a wild, wanton need that broke through every single barrier she had ever erected between them. It was wonderful, it was right, it was like touching Heaven after spending years as an outcast in Hell. It was heat after the big freeze; it was solid land after being cast adrift. It was her destiny rediscovered in the soul-healing crush of his warm, wonderful mouth.
She groaned, whimpering because she could feel herself coming alive, every emotion she possessed exploding through the constraints she exerted over them. Her lips began to cling instead of trying to break free, her heart was thundering with a power that almost completely enveloped her, breasts tightening, their tips seeming to waken from a long, long sleep that now set them pulsing and stretching, reaching out like twin sensors towards the only stimulus that ever roused them.
And deep, deep down inside her a fire began to erupt, an old fire, a fierce fire, a fire that was lit only by the match this man had the power to strike.
He felt it. His mouth lifted from hers, his parted lips moist and pulsing. ‘Cara mia...’ he breathed, bringing her stunned blue gaze jerking up to meet the driven blackness of his. ‘I knew it.’
‘No,’ she denied, trying—trying to tug it all back under wraps again.
But it was already too late. She could see it burning in the knowing glitter of his darkened eyes, see it in the flush of heat striking out from his high cheekbones, could feel it in his body that was slowly tightening with desire against her.
She could taste it in his mouth, which was suddenly covering her own again with a passion that left her no room whatsoever to scurry back into hiding.
Sandro had kissed her before many times. He had kissed her gently, he had kissed her coaxingly, he had even kissed her teasingly—especially during those earlier, happier days of their relationship. Later had come the impassioned kisses, the ones he’d struggled to keep in check because their desires had ignited so easily then. After they were married, and frustration began to play a vital part in any kisses they used to share, he would kiss her hungrily, sometimes angrily, but mostly with a painful kind of plea that used to tear her apart inside.
But this was different. This wasn’t teasing, or angry, or anything like that wretched pleading that used to tear her apart so much. This was mutual need, pure and simple, and it flooded through both of them in a hot and torrid gush of dark, dizzying pleasure.
Then, ‘No,’ she breathed. ‘I can’t do this.’ And she abruptly broke free of him, taking a couple of very necessary steps backwards, haunted eyes fixed on his oddly sombre expression, considering the victory he had just won over her defences.
‘Why can’t you?’ he asked, very, very gently.
Tears washed across her eyes, then left again. ‘I can’t,’ she repeated shakily—then, almost tragically, ‘I just can’t!
He sighed, a flicker of pain disturbing his long,
lush lashes—before he was grimly blanking it out. ‘None the less,’ he said firmly, ‘this is where we begin, cara, not where we end it. Now, come,’ he commanded, giving her no chance to clear her brain of one trauma before he was resolutely swinging her into another by firmly taking hold of one her hands.
Ignoring the way she tried to break free from him, he pulled her towards the waiting lift. ‘We are late,’ he informed her as they reached it. ‘We will have to hurry if we are to make it in time.’
‘But—where are we going?’ she demanded, trying not to react to a new wave of panic, which belonged to the lift, not to Sandro’s grimly determined behaviour as he pulled her inside it.
‘You will see soon enough,’ he replied, holding onto her wrist as he turned to set the lift doors closing.
Then his attention was fully back on her, his gnp shifting to her slender waist as he propped her up against the lift wall and held her there. They began to move. She closed her eyes and tried very hard to fight the whole gamut of horrors suddenly rocketing through her. Not least was his closeness, the shattering residue of that incredible kiss they had just shared, and his words, which had carried such a threatening thread of finality with them.
And, of course, there was the lift, that wretched lift.
‘Tell me, why are you so frightened of travelling in this lift?’ Sandro asked huskily.
She shook her bright head, eyes squeezed tight shut, face white, trembling lips pinned back against her clenched teeth.
‘I can feel your heart fluttering like a trapped butterfly... ’
And you’re too close and I can’t breathe, and I feel like I’m about to explode with stress! she thought hectically.
He kissed each of her pulsing temples, brushed his mouth over each quivering eyelid before doing the same thing to either corner of her quivering mouth.
‘Don’t...’ she breathed, turning her head to one side in rejection, then, contrarily, her hands were jerking up from her sides and clutching tightly at his jacket lapels in case she drove him away.
It was awful, this dizzying tumble of confused emotions that wanted their own safe space—yet they wanted him to fill it. She wasn’t even sure if she was reacting like this because of the lift or because of Sandro any more!
The Marriage Surrender Page 7