‘You are so very beautiful—do you know that?’ he murmured with an excruciating low-voiced intimacy. ‘Even after all of these years, you can still take my breath away.’
‘I’m poison for you,’ she gritted, hating him—loving him.
‘You don’t taste like poison,’ he said, and ran the moist tip of his tongue along her extended jawline. ‘You taste of vanilla. I adore vanilla...’
Oh, dear God! ‘Sandro!’ she pleaded. ‘I can’t bear this!’
‘Me or the lift?’ he questioned huskily.
‘Both!’ she cried. ‘Damn it—both!’
‘Well, the lift has stopped moving,’ he informed her lazily. ‘Which only leaves me to wonder why you are still clinging to me as though your very life depends on my being this close to you...’
Stopped? Her eyes flicked open, struck directly into his—his smiling, mocking, teasing eyes, eyes that were challenging her even as they darkened with yet another message that had her fingers flexing on his jacket lapels.
‘No,’ she protested.
‘Most definitely,’ he insisted. Then he kissed her again, long and deep and achingly gently.
‘This is it, Joanna,’ he warned as he drew away again to watch her lashes flutter upwards to reveal eyes dazed by a hopeless passion. ‘So keep looking at me,’ he urged. ‘For this is what I am now. Not the guy who crept stealthily around your problems the way I did the last time we were together—but this man. The one who means to invade your defensive space at every opportunity he gets. And do you know why?’ he enquired of those dazed and shimmering pure blue eyes. ‘Because each time I do it, you shudder with horror less, and quiver with pleasure more. An interesting point, don’t you think?’
Was it? She didn’t think so; she thought it was utterly terrifying. What was happening to her? Had the two years of never letting herself go near him made her so hungry, so desperate, that she couldn’t even fight herself any more?
‘I can never be a proper wife to you,’ she warned him, and she meant it—knew it as a fact so solid that even this dreadful, aching clutch of need would never change that for her.
‘You think so?’ he pondered. Then, ‘Well, we shall see.’
At last he moved away from her, gave her space to wilt, then pull herself together, gave her the chance to take in her strange new surroundings.
They seemed to have arrived in a basement car park, judging by the rows of cars she could see beyond the lift’s open doors. One, in particular, stood like a shiny black statement of wealth right in front of them: a long and shining luxury limousine.
Sandro took a grip on her arm again and led the way towards it. A man dressed in a black chauffeur’s uniform jumped to open the car’s rear door. Sandro saw Joanna inside, then followed her, and it was only as she shuffled quickly along the soft leather seat in an effort to place as much distance between them as she possibly could that her fingers made contact with something soft and bulky. She glanced down to find Sandro’s black over-coat, scarf and gloves lying tossed on the seat like yet another statement.
The war guise of a man on a mission, she recalled, and shivered. Because it was becoming very clear that Sandro was still on that mission. Arthur Bates had only been one part he had already dealt with; the rest of Sandro’s mission involved herself.
‘Where are we going?’ she dared to ask, once the car was in motion and sweeping smoothly out into thin March daylight.
He didn’t answer immediately, so she sat there tense, waiting with her senses already prepared for him to say, The house in Belgravia.
But he didn’t. Instead his hand went into his jacket pocket and came out with something else to drop casually onto her lap. ‘You forgot to put these on when you came out this morning,’ he drawled. ‘Put them on now.’
It was her ring box. Her fingers fluttered down to touch it. Her ring box which had been safely stashed away inside her drawer of memories when she’d left her flat this morning.
Her drawer of memories, which Sandro must have sifted through. He must have seen what was hidden there. Her wedding photograph, in which she stood in her gown of flowing white silk beside this man, dressed not unlike the way in which he was dressed right now. A photograph that wasn’t framed like Molly’s picture because it was just too painful to be placed out on show, so it had gone in the drawer with her other painful mementos.
Wild colour ran up her throat and into her cheeks in a mottled flush of mortification. She stared at the box, just kept staring fixedly at it while Sandro stared at her bent head, knowing.
It was crucifying, knowing that he now knew how she had kept every tiny insignificant thing he had ever given to her. The simple but exquisitely made gold studs for her ears and the fine link gold bracelet with its double heart safety catch. The pretty lace-edged handkerchiefs embroidered with her name and never used because he’d had them made specially during one of his trips abroad and she treasured them too much. Or the stack of postcards, one for every journey he had taken away from her in those months leading up to their wedding day. ‘Missing you’ was all he had written on every one, but—her throat locked—‘Missing you’ had meant so very, very much.
Then there was the silly set of toy cartoon characters, one for each quickly snatched lunch they had shared between his busy working day and her lunch and evening shifts at a fast-food restaurant. But of all those none of them bruised her heart more than the knowledge that Sandro had looked into the very private and personal centre of her, and had seen the leather-bound book, inside which was lovingly pressed the head of a flower from each bouquet he had ever given her.
Hot tears stung across her eyes, then were winked away again. She couldn’t speak, didn’t even try to. Sandro let the knowing silence pulse between them for a while, then reached out with a long gentle set of fingers to her chin, pushing it upwards so she had no choice but to look directly at him.
‘They are safe,’ he assured her. ‘You need not worry.’
The tears came again, and again were winked away, but not before he’d seen them, and not before she had witnessed the expression written in his.
‘Sandro...’ she began unsteadily.
But—no. He was not going to allow her to say anything he did not wish to hear right now.
‘We are going to Heathrow.’ He totally threw her by announcing this, letting go of her chin, letting go of her eyes, and returning to man-on-a-mission mode again. ‘We catch the late afternoon flight for Rome, where we will begin from the very beginning again.’
From the beginning.
Joanna sat there, stunned into total paralysis as the full meaning of those coolly delivered words sank in. Rome, where they had begun their married life three years ago. Rome, where it had all gone so terribly sour for them. Rome, to his beautiful apartment overlooking the Colosseum.
Rome. They were going back to Rome, to begin at the beginning again. Only this time Sandro intended to make sure the outcome was nothing like the last time. She knew that without him having to say so out loud. Knew it because every single thing he had said and done since he arrived back from seeing Arthur Bates had told her as much.
‘I can’t do this...’ she whispered.
‘Put on your rings,’ was all he replied.
CHAPTER FIVE
THEY flew out from London’s cold grey skies into the warm blue of the Mediterranean. Joanna barely noticed. She barely spoke, barely focused on anything going on around her. She felt emotionally grid-locked, trapped, with no way to turn, nor any hope of escaping from the coils of control Sandro had smoothly bound about her.
He had done it all within a few short hours of leaving her locked away in his plush penthouse prison. Not a bad achievement, she grudgingly acknowledged. He had dealt with Arthur Bates, gone directly to her flat to clear it out, terminated her lease, made their arrangements to fly to Rome, then returned to deal with her.
Efficient? She’d always known him to be efficient. Stubborn? It went without saying that a man o
f his character must be stubborn or he would not be so effective. Determined? No question about it; the very foundation of his success in life was built on his own steadfast determination to succeed.
But suicidal? She could not bring herself to believe that he was crazy enough to want to set himself up for a second dose of married life with her.
But every time she opened her mouth in an attempt to reason with him he seemed to sense the words coming, and he would reach across the gap between their two seats to pick up her hand and raise it lazily to his lips, where he would keep it, his breath warm against her trembling skin, while he continued reading the business papers he had brought with him on the trip and waited patiently for her to subside again.
Only when she eventually subsided did he let her have her hand back. The man was unassailable when he had his mind set on something, and, right now that something was his failed marriage, and his estranged wife who had been foolish enough to go to him in her hour of need.
Now she rued that decision more than she had ever rued anything else in her entire life—except marrying him in the first place, of course.
‘Sandro...’ She actually managed to get his name out before her took hold of her hand.
‘Not now,’ he said, his attention still fixed on his precious papers. ‘I like privacy when I fight with you, cara. Try to contain yourself until we reach home.’
Home. A short sigh broke from her and she twisted her hand free from his so she could subside again, her eyes bleak, her concerns acting like spurs to her agitated nerve-ends—which were not allowed to appear agitated because Sandro did not like public scenes.
And she adhered to that because—despite every bitter and resentful thing she was feeling—she still, still could not bring herself to show him up in public.
But his Rome apartment would always be the place of her very worst memory. She felt sick to the stomach even thinking about it. The closer they got, the worse she began to feel.
So much so that by the time they had left the plane and made their way to the low black Ferrari that had been parked ready for their arrival she was paler than pale, features drawn, eyes bruised by a deep sense of foreboding that was almost eating her up inside.
Sandro ignored it—of course he ignored it! she noted angrily as she sat beside him on the final leg of this journey down memory lane. He was the man on a mission, focused, blinkered. He didn’t care what it was doing to her, only that he was determined to do it!
‘I hate you,’ she whispered at one point as they ground to a halt in Rome’s famous traffic.
He ignored that too, preferring instead to switch on the in-car stereo. Orchestral music blared out from the radio: Verdi’s ‘Requiem’. It seemed so utterly fitting that she was surprised, therefore, when he quickly flicked it into CD mode so the much less provocative sound of a Mozart concerto filled the car.
He parked in a side-street beside his elegant apartment block, in one of those parking spaces that always seemed to magically open up for people like Sandro. Then he was shutting down the engine and climbing out of the car. By the time he had opened Joanna’s door she was in a state of near collapse. His hand came out, dealing first with her seat belt for her, then firmly anchoring itself around her wrist to pull her out of the car.
She refused to look at him but she could feel his grimness, his dark sense of resolution, as he held onto her wrist while he shut the door and locked up the car.
Then—there it was: the aged ochre walls of a seventeenth-century building that had once been a beautiful palazzo and was now converted into three luxury apartments, one to each floor. Sandro had the top one; his bank owned the whole building, but of course its chairman lived at the top—which meant a lift was needed to get there.
His hand moved from her wrist to curve around her waist and, even as her spine tensed in tingling response, he set them moving, touching her, as he had promised, at every opportunity now, and she felt so brittle she wondered if her bones would actually snap if he squeezed her too tightly.
‘Where’s the luggage?’ she asked tensely. Until that moment she had been too lost within her own growing nightmare to have noticed that they had traversed the whole airport and driven away in his car without collecting bags of any kind.
‘There is none,’ he answered coolly, still keeping her moving with that hand at her waist, so the full weight of his arm was angled across her rigid spine. ‘We won’t be needing it.’
They’d reached the apartment building entrance by now, stepping inside the luxurious foyer with its original wall frescos so beautifully renovated, like the priceless furniture surrounding them and the cleverly disguised lift hidden away behind its carved solid oak doors.
Joanna pushed a hand up to her trembling mouth as her stomach began to chum with an increasing frenzy. ‘I feel sick,’ she breathed.
Sandro ignored that too, grimly calling down the lift, then walking her inside it. It was palatial, red and golds mingling with oak, a gilded mirror fixed to its back wall.
She turned quickly away from her own haunted reflection, found her face pressed against Sandro’s broad chest and left it there, trembling and shaking like a baby while he grimly started the lift, then closed both arms around her.
‘I can’t do this!’ she choked into his chest, where she could feel the persistent throb of his beating heart.
‘Shush,’ he soothed, brushing his mouth across the top of her head. ‘You can do it,’ he insisted. ‘And you will.’
The man with the mission had spoken, so no argument. She had never known him like this before, so rock-solidly determined that nothing seemed to get through to him.
The lift stopped. He helped her out, almost carried her across the deep red carpet to double doors set in two foot-deep reveals that marked the true beginning of her nightmare.
One of Sandro’s hands snaked out, briskly unlocking then pushing those big doors inwards. He stepped inside, attempting to take her with him, but she could not step over that wretched threshold as the bad memories began circling all around her.
This place, she was thinking tragically, this beautiful place so tastefully refurbished, in keeping with the building’s great age and history. This large-roomed, high-ceilinged, exceptionally refined place where Sandro had brought her three years ago, with his ideals riding high on a buffeting cloud of anticipation—only to have them all brought crashing down at his disbelieving feet
‘I don’t think I can bear it,’ she whispered threadily.
She was clutching at him, one set of anguished fingers clawing at his shirt front while the other did the same to the back of his jacket.
‘Shush, cara,’ he soothed her yet again, his arm still curved around her, holding her securely anchored to his side. ‘You must learn to trust me...’
Trust him? It wasn’t a matter of trust! It was a matter of sheer self-preservation!
‘Let me go to a hotel,’ she pleaded. ‘Just for tonight! Please, Sandro! I can’t go in there!’
‘You must know that the only way forward is to face the ghosts, Joanna,’ he determined grimly. ‘We will face them together. Now, come,’ he urged, trying to draw her over that threshold while she dug her heels in like some recalcitrant donkey and refused point-blank to budge.
‘Joanna, stop this,’ he sighed in exasperation. ‘You have no need to be afraid of this apartment!’
I do! she thought. I need to be quite this afraid of it.
‘Let go of me or I shall s-start screaming,’ she warned.
‘But this is foolish!’ he snapped, losing all patience with her. ‘You are becoming hysterical!’
Hysterical? Yes, she was becoming hysterical. She didn’t want to be here; she didn’t want this—laying of ghosts he was threatening her with. She just wanted to—!
‘I know, Joanna!’ Sandro rasped out suddenly. ‘You are hiding nothing by acting like this! For I know why you treated me the way you did the last time we were here together!’
He knew? Fo
r a short shocked moment she just stared at him blankly. Then—of course he didn’t know! She completely denied the claim. He couldn’t know. Nobody knew except for Molly—and she’d only ever known a tiny fraction of it!
Of course Sandro couldn’t know—could he? ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she murmured shakily.
If anything, his face went all the harder, more determined, frighteningly determined. ‘Yes, you do,’ he insisted. ‘I am talking about what happened to you the week before you married me. The night you were attacked.’ He spelled it out brutally. ‘On your way home from working late. I know, cara,’ he repeated with a pained kind of gentle intensity. ‘I know...’
It was like having a spring uncoil inside her and she jumped violently away from him. ‘No,’ she said, as her surroundings began to spin. ‘You can’t know.’ She denied it absolutely. ‘No.’
‘Listen to me—’ he urged.
‘No!’ she began to back away from him, face white, eyes gone slightly wild, while Sandro watched her with a kind of distressed understanding that almost sliced her in two. ‘No,’ she said again when he took a step towards her. ‘You don’t know,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t want you to know!’
‘But, Joanna—’
‘Not you, Sandro. Not you!’ she cried out in such heart-rending agony that he seemed to catch it in his chest like a blow.
Her stumbling backward steps took her all the way to the wall opposite the doors to his apartment, but still she kept going, sideways now, tracking herself along the wall while Sandro stood there watching her with such grim compassion in his eyes that she wanted to die, wanted to shrivel up where she was; she wanted the floor to open up and swallow her whole.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she breathed, feeling trapped and helpless and so exposed she could have been standing here naked, while her fevered mind filled with looming dark shadows, lurid bulks of silently moving flesh leering at her, laughing, sniggering.
The Marriage Surrender Page 8