And then there was Sandro, coming towards her, slowly, stealthily, like a man approaching a frightened animal. ‘It had to come out into the open!’ he uttered in a harsh, driven voice that pleaded even as it whipped her. ‘You cannot—I cannot keep it hidden any longer! Madre di dio!’ he sighed. ‘Can you not see what it is doing to you?’
‘No.’ Refusing to listen, refusing to accept, she shook her head. ‘You don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t want you to know.’
‘But why?’ he demanded in pained bemusement. ‘Why can you not trust me with this? Why do you need to shut me out!’
Why was easy, but she was in no state to answer him. Her tracking fingertips made contact with wooden framework, sending her face twisting sideways to where she found herself staring through the open doors to the waiting lift. Somewhere inside her head there was a strange buzzing sound, and in the distance Sandro’s voice, low and deep and oddly constricted, was saying something about them going into the apartment and talking about it.
But she didn’t want to talk about it! She didn’t want to be here in this place!
Escape.
She had to escape before it all came crashing down on her.
‘Joanna—’
She made a dive for those open lift doors, almost hurling herself inside them.
And suddenly there it was, the big black hole she had spent so many months carefully skirting around. Only this time it claimed her. She tumbled headlong into it, falling—falling for what seemed like for ever, until eventually there was nothing, nothing but a strange feeling of utter weightlessness and the blackness, that terrible, all-enveloping, mind-numbing blackness...
The climb back to reality was a long and arduous one. Every time she thought she might be getting there, the rim of the dark hole would crumble beneath her grasping fingers and she would slide back down again, sobbing in anguish and in fear, her teeth gritting in frustration. Her fingers scrambled to catch hold of something, anything, to stop her falling, so she could begin the laborious climb out once again.
Sometimes she feared she would never make it, that she was destined to spend the rest of her life climbing the steep walls of this hole, only to slide down again. And sometimes ghastly familiar faces would come leering at her over the rim, laughing and taunting her wasted efforts. Sometimes it was the leering young face of a skinhead yobbo; sometimes it was Arthur Bates, his greedy eyes warning her what to expect if she did ever get out of her dark prison.
Then Molly would come, pushing those awful men out of the way and smiling reassuringly at her, urging her upwards with a hand stretched out for her to try and catch hold of. But the hand always stayed those few precious few inches out of reach. ‘It isn’t fair,’ she whimpered fretfully. ‘It just isn’t fair. I can’t reach you.’
‘Shush,’ a soothing voice murmured. ‘I am here. I have hold of you.’
And she frowned, because that voice wasn’t Molly’s voice; it was Sandro’s. She looked up, saw him leaning over the rim of the hole and reaching down for her. His arm was longer than Molly’s, he managed to grab a hold on her wrist, pull her up. Up and up. He bodily yanked her over the rim of the hole, then tossed her to ground which was too far away for her to tumble back in.
It was such a relief, such a wonderful relief, that she smiled and thanked him. He covered her up with a blanket. ‘Go to sleep,’ he commanded. ‘You are safe here.’
And she really did feel safe at last, so safe that she drifted into a blissfully peaceful and uncluttered sleep where she felt warm and protected by the arms enfolding her.
Joanna opened her eyes to find sunlight seeping in through a silk draped floor-to-ceiling window onto a cream and pale blue colour-washed room. It was a lovely room, she decided sleepily. She liked the high ceiling and the feeling of space it seemed to offer. She liked the subtle use of the two pastel colours; they were cool and restful. She wondered who the room belonged to.
Where was she? She frowned, having a hazy recollection of something terrible happening, but as for what, she couldn’t quite manage to recall at the moment.
Then a grimly protracted voice murmured flatly, ‘How do you feel?’ making her head turn sharply on the pillow to find Sandro reclining in an easy chair beside the bed.
His dark head was turned her way, his brown eyes fixed on her with absolutely no expression whatsoever. Gone was the electrifying power-dressing suit she had last seen him wearing, and in its place were casual linen trousers and a plain black polo shirt.
Power-dressing, she repeated to herself, and suddenly it all came back in a horrified rush. The memories, where she was, why she was lying here like this, and why Sandro was sitting there like that, looking as though he had been there for hours—hours just watching her—knowing...
‘What happened?’ she asked, desperately playing for time while she tried to come to terms with what had taken place earlier.
‘You don’t remember?’
She remembered almost everything in razor-sharp detail, but to admit to that meant facing it, and at the moment she couldn’t bear to face it ‘Not much,’ she lied. ‘Only a vague recollection of you and I arguing. Did we have a row?’
‘You could say that.’ He smiled an odd twist of a smile. ‘Then you—became ill.’
Became ill, she mused balefully. She had not merely become ill, she had jumped into the screaming pits of Hell rather than face up to what Sandro had claimed he knew about her.
‘Where am I?’
‘In Rome. In my apartment,’ he said, eyeing her narrowly. ‘Where you collapsed. When you showed no sign of recovering, I called in a doctor.’
A doctor? Oh, good grief! How long had she been lying here like this? ‘And he said—what?’ she enquired, very warily.
His eyes made a critical sweep of her too-slender shape beneath the thin layer of bedding, and for the first time she realised that she was wearing nothing more than what felt like a tee shirt.
Her eyelashes lowered, quickly covering a burst of flurried heat because she was suddenly acutely aware that someone had undressed her and put her to bed like this—and that person could only have been Sandro.
‘He called it a combination of too much stress,’ he answered, ‘and not eating enough food to keep a mouse alive.’
Sandro—had Sandro undressed her?
‘I’ve had the ‘flu recently,’ she said, pushing a decidedly shaky hand to her brow so she could hide behind it. ‘Maybe it was that.’
He didn’t answer, made absolutely no comment, and she didn’t dare look at him to see if she could discover what he was thinking.
‘I’m thirsty,’ she announced, trying to moisten paper-dry lips with an equally dry tongue.
He was instantly on his feet and stepping over to a bedside table where a crystal jug full of iced water and a glass tumbler stood glinting in the rich sunlight. While he poured the water she pulled herself into a sitting position, only to stop, pushing her hand back to her brow, when her head began swimming dizzily.
Sandro stopped what he was doing to reach out a hand towards her. She saw it coming and instinctively stiffened in readiness for its electrifying touch. It hovered there in mid-air for a long second while her teeth gritted and the silence in the room became thick with tension.
Then the hand diverted, going to pick up the pillows from behind her and resettling them so she could lean back against them. She did so out of sheer necessity, face pale, eyes closed, feeling so weak inside it was almost pathetic.
Silently Sandro waited. When she could stand it no longer she opened her eyes, and honed them onto the glass full of iced water he was holding; she simply stared at it, wondering how she was going to take it from him without letting her fingers brush against his.
‘I am not a monster,’ he said grimly, knowing exactly what she was thinking.
‘Thank you,’ she mumbled, feeling cruel and heartless, and forced herself to take the glass.
She wanted to apologise, but when she did tha
t it tended to make him angry, so instead she said nothing and sipped at the refreshing water, wishing he would sit down again, because when he stood over her like this she felt so intimidated. Wishing he would go away because she needed some time to herself to come to terms with yesterday’s catastrophic developments.
Then a frown touched her brow. Was it only yesterday she had walked herself right into Sandro’s power again? She had no real idea what day it was, or of the time, except the sunlight was suggesting to her that this was at least one new day. Maybe there had been others. Maybe she had been lying here for days and days, fighting to climb out of that awful dark pit.
Then, no, she told herself, as the nerve-ends throughout her whole system began to tighten. She must not let herself think about those dreadful dreams or she might start to fall apart all over again.
‘How long have I been here?’ she asked Sandro
He sat down again, which was marginally better than having him stand over her. Then he really brought the whole lot bursting back out in the open by informing her with super-silk sardonism, ‘Today is the second day of your new life. cara. You spent what was left of your first day half-comatose, you see...’
See? Oh, she saw everything! And nearly dropped the glass. She hadn’t fooled him in the slightest. He knew she remembered and he wasn’t going to let her get away with lying about it!
‘I think I hate you,’ she whispered miserably.
‘Si,’ he sighed. ‘So you are continually telling me.’
Then suddenly he was back on his feet again, taking the glass of water from her and setting it aside so he could come and lean over her, much in the same way he had done yesterday, when he’d meant to make a very important point.
‘But don’t think—’ he warned, dipping his head to catch her eyes and, when she quickly lowered them, placing a hand on her chin to make her look at him—make her look and see the grim determination written in his own glinting dark eyes. ‘Don’t think that your lousy opinion of me or my own lousy guilty conscience for putting you into this damn bed the way I did is going to reverse what actually happened yesterday, because it is not! Now I have you out in the open, you are staying out,’ he vowed.
Then he straightened, turned and walked out of the room, leaving her sitting there wondering balefully what he had in store for her if he could still be this angry so many hours later.
‘Oh, damn it,’ she sighed as her head began to swim again.
What in heaven’s name had she let herself in for by setting herself up for this? She didn’t need it—didn’t want it! And she was as sure as anything that Sandro couldn’t want to put them both through this kind of hell a second time!
It had been bad enough the first time around, she recalled heavily. Her loving him, needing him, wanting him so badly but unable to let him touch her. His hurt, his frustration, his soul-crushing bewilderment at why she was reacting to him like that!
Why should he understand it? The week before they were due to be married she had barely been able to keep her hands off him. Then he’d flown here, to Rome, to put in place the finishing touches on the wholesale transfer of his head offices to London—because Joanna needed to stay in London until Molly was old enough, and financially independent enough, to survive there on her own.
Molly...
The pretty, pale blue-washed ceiling clouded out of focus. In Joanna’s view, Molly had been the absolute opposite of her more determined and fiercely independent big sister. But then, Joanna had needed to be, because, at the tender age of eighteen, she had taken over full responsibility for her fourteen-year-old sister, when their mother had died after a long, long illness which had left them with no one else to turn to; four years before that Grandpa had gone, taking with him the only period in her life when Joanna could have said with any certainty that she had felt truly cared for, instead of being the one who did the caring.
But that was another story, one not worth rehashing, because she still missed Grandpa and his tiny smallholding in Kent as much as she still missed Molly.
They had been half-sisters really, born by different fathers to a mother who, by her own admission, had loved many men—though none of them well enough to want to tie herself down. And, in the circular way life tends to turn, both Joanna and Molly had secretly yearned for the so-called old-fashioned and conventional close family unit, with a father as well as a mother to claim as their own.
It was not to be. A small sigh shook her. Consequently, growing up had been tougher for Molly and herself than most—though not so tough as some. They’d had a home of sorts: a rented flat in the East End district of London where their mother had taken them to live after Grandpa died. Their mother had worked all hours to keep them reasonably fed, clothed and healthy, and Joanna had taken care of Molly—then of her mother and Molly, when their mother eventually became ill.
So, continuing to take care of Molly after their mother had gone had not been any real hardship. She’d been used to doing it. They’d stayed on in the flat their mother had rented, and Joanna had started working all the hours - she could to keep that same roof over their heads while Molly finished her education.
Molly had been clever. She’d been quiet, shy and studious, and incredibly pretty: blonde-haired and blue eyed with sweet gentle features. Joanna had harboured a secret dream where Molly would go on to university, make something of herself, then meet a wonderful man who would treasure her baby sister for the rest of her life.
Only, it was Joanna who had met the wonderful man. It was as if Sandro had stepped right out of her dreams for Molly and had become her own dream.
It had been magical. Once again, she was transported back to that tiny back-street Italian restaurant where she’d worked at in the evenings. He’d been superbly dressed, beautifully groomed and so handsome he took her breath away. She had never in her life come face to face with a man like Alessandro.
He’d come to visit Vito and had ended up staying all evening to flirt with Joanna instead, seemingly fascinated by the pretty red-haired waitress who was so bright and cheerful, and contrarily shy when he tried turning on his charismatic Italian charm.
He’d waited for her until she’d finished work that night and walked her home. Within a month he was like a permanent fixture—at the restaurant, and at the small flat she’d shared with Molly. And Joanna had been so blindly in love with him, she hadn’t really thought much about who he was or what he was. It hadn’t seemed to matter that he drove a fast car and wore designer clothes. Or that he was always having to fly off somewhere on business. He wasn’t standoffish, though he had been critical of the fact that she’d held down two jobs—working during the day-time in a wine bar and nights at the restaurant—but only because it hadn’t left her much time to be with him.
The problems had started when he’d asked her to marry him and come to live with him, here in Rome. She couldn’t leave Molly, who had only been seventeen then, and had had another full year in education before Joanna could even begin thinking of her own future.
He’d accepted it—amazing, now, as she looked back and thought about how Sandro had accepted every obstacle she’d tossed in his way: ‘Molly needs me here; I won’t desert her after all we’ve been through together.’
‘Fine,’ he’d said. ‘Then I will have to find another way.’ And he had. He’d decided to move himself to London. ‘I will move heaven and earth if that is what it will take for you and I to be together,’ he’d explained.
Then there was the night when she’d shyly told him that she was still a virgin. Later she’d wished she’d kept her silly mouth shut, because he had been about to make love to her then, finally and fully. For the first time in weeks they had actually managed to grab a full evening at her flat without Molly, because she was staying at a friend’s house. So there they’d been, half undressed and wonderfully lost in each other, when it had suddenly occurred to her that she should warn him.
He’d been so stunned, then so damned pleased about i
t that she’d been almost offended. ‘I can’t believe it.’ He’d grinned at her. ‘I have a real live angel in my arms and she’s going to be all mine!’
‘I’m no angel!’ she’d protested. ‘Just a very busy girl who’s not had time to get into heavy relationships!’
She should have seen the writing on the wall then, when he’d suddenly changed towards her, stopped being so passionate, stopped trying to seduce her at every opportunity he could get, and begun treating her like some rare object he had to cosset and protect from the big bad wolf lurking inside him.
‘You are special,’ he’d explained. ‘I want our wedding night to be special. I want you to wear white when you marry me and I want to stand beside you and think, This woman is special and she is coming to me pure of body! What more could any man wish for in the woman he loves?’
And that was when she’d begun to worry that Sandro loved her virginity more than he loved her!
But she had been busy, still working two jobs because she was stubbornly insisting on paying for her own bridal gown and trousseau, and time had been racing by, so she hadn’t particularly dwelt on his obsession with her virginal state because she’d had more important things to think about—like being nervous about meeting his very large family, or moving into his lovely home in Belgravia, where she’d felt like a duck in a swan’s nest from the moment she’d first stepped over the threshold. Then there’d been Molly to worry about, because she was suddenly making noises about not going on to university, about getting a job instead and maybe even a flat to share with some friends. And Joanna had been worried that Molly was saying all of this because she felt she should be leaving Joanna and Sandro alone to start their marriage.
So she’d been pretty lost in worries that night she travelled on the Underground home from work a week before her wedding day. Too preoccupied to be alerted to what was brewing around her on that train.
Afterwards—well, afterwards she’d found her whole world had come tumbling down, bringing Sandro’s world tumbling down with it.
The Marriage Surrender Page 9