скачать книгу бесплатно
Understand? Of course she understood! ‘You want to know if they were Sicilian,’ she choked. ‘Well, yes! They were Sicilian—like you!’ she said accusingly. ‘I recognised the accent, the same blinding contempt for anything and anyone who is not of the same breed!’
He ignored all of that. ‘Male or female?’ he persisted.
‘M-male,’ she breathed.
‘Old—young—could you tell?’
She shook her head. ‘M-muffled. The v-voice was m-muffled—by something held over the m-mouthpiece, I think.’ Then she gagged, her hand whipping up to cover her quivering mouth.
Yet, ruthlessly, he reached up to catch the hand, removed it, held it trapped in his own in a firm command for attention.
‘Did he speak in English?’
She nodded. ‘But with a Sicilian accent. Let go of me...’
He ignored that. ‘And what did he say? Exactly, Sara,’ be insisted. ‘What did he say?’
She began to shake all over—shake violently, eyes closing as she locked herself onto that terrible conversation that had confirmed her worst fears. “‘We h-have your ch-hild,” ’she quoted, word for mind-numbing word. Her fingers were icy cold and trembling so badly that he began gently chafing them with his own. ‘“Sh-she is s-safe for now. Get S-Santino. He will know wh-what to do. We w-will contact you again at seventh-thirty...”’ Dazedly she glanced around the room. ‘What time is it?’ she asked jerkily.
‘Shush. Not yet six,’ he murmured calmingly. ‘Concentrate, Sara. Did he say anything else? Did you hear anything else? Any background sound, other voices, a plane, a car—anything?’
She shook her head. ‘N-nothing.’ No sound. Only the voice. Not even the sound of a child crying—‘Oh, God.’ She whipped her hand out from between his to cover her eyes. ‘My baby,’ she whispered. ‘My poor baby... I want her here!’ She turned on him, holding out her arms and looking lost and tormented and heart-rendingly pathetic. ‘In my arms...’ Her arms folded and closed around her slender body, hugging, hugging as if the small child were already there and safe. ‘Oh, God,’ she groaned. ‘Oh, God, Nicolas, do something. Do something!’
‘OK,’ he muttered, but distractedly. ‘OK. It will be done. But I want to know why the hell I was not informed of this telephone conversation. Was it taped?’ He was frowning blackly. ‘The police have a trace on this line. It must have been taped!’
‘Afraid someone may recognise the voice?’ she seared at him scathingly. His golden eyes withered her with a look, then he climbed grimly to his feet. Alarm shot through her. ‘Where are you going?’ she bit out shrilly.
Glancing down at her, he could have been hewn from stone again. ‘To do something about this, as you requested,’ he replied. ‘In the meantime I suggest you go to your room and try to rest.’ His gaze flicked dispassionately over her. ‘I will keep you informed of any developments.’
‘Leave it all to you, you mean,’ she surmised from that.
His cool nod confirmed it. ‘It is, after all, why I am here.’
The only reason why he was here. ‘Where were you?’ she asked him, curious suddenly. ‘When they told you. Where were you?’
‘New York.’
She frowned. ‘New York? But it’s been only six hours since—’
‘Concorde,’ he drawled—then added tauntingly, ‘Still suspecting me of stealing your child?’
Her chin came up, bitterness turning her blue eyes as cold as his tiger ones. ‘We both know you’re quite capable of it,’ she said.
‘But why should I want to?’ he quite sensibly pointed out. ‘She bears no threat to me.’
‘No?’ Sara questioned that statement. ‘Until he rids himself of one wife and finds himself another, Lia is the legitimate heir of Nicolas Santino. Whether or not he was man enough to conceive her.’
As a provocation it was one step too far. She knew it even as his eyes flashed, and he was suddenly leaning over her, his white teeth glinting dangerously between tightened lips, the alluring scent of his aftershave corppletely overlaid by the stark scent of danger. ‘Take care, wife,’ be gritted, ‘what you say to me!’
‘And you take care,’ she threw shakily back, ‘that you hand my baby back to me in one whole and hearty piece. Or so help me, Nicolas,’ she vowed, ‘I will drag the Santino name through the gutters of every tabloid in the world!’
The eyes flashed again, black spiralling into gold as they burned into blue. ‘To tell them—what?’ he demanded thinly. ‘What vile crime do you believe you can lay at my feet, eh? Have I not given you and your child everything you could wish for? My home,’ he listed. ‘My money. And, not least, my name!’
Every one of which Sara saw entirely as her due. ‘And for whose sake?’ she derided him scathingly. ‘Your own sake, Nicolas.’ She gave the answer for him. ‘To protect your own Sicilian pride!’
‘What pride?’ Abruptly he straightened and turned away. ‘You killed my pride when you took another man to your bed.’
Her heart squeezed in a moment’s pained sympathy for this man who had lived with that belief for the last three years. And he was right; even if what he was saying was wrong, simply believing it to be true must have dealt a lethal blow to his monumental pride.
‘Ah!’ His hand flew out, long, sculptured fingers flicking her a gesture of distaste. ‘I will not discuss this with you any further. You disgust me. I disgust myself even bothering to talk to you.’ He turned, striding angrily to the door.
‘Nicolas!’ Forcing her stiff and aching limbs to propel her to her feet again, she stopped him as he went to leave the room.
He paused with his hand on the doorknob, his long body lean and lithe and pulsing with contempt. He did not turn back to face her, and tears—weak tears which came from that deep, dark well where she now kept the love she’d once felt for him—burned suddenly in her eyes.
‘Nicolas—please...’ she pleaded. ‘Whatever you believe about me, Lia has committed no crime!’
‘I know that,’ he answered stiltedly.
The wretched sound of her anxiety wrenched from her in a sob. ‘Then please—please get her safely back for me!’
Her plea stiffened his spine, made the muscles in the side of his neck stand out in response as he turned slightly to face her. His eyes, those hard, cold, angry eyes, fixed on the way she was standing there with her waist-length, gossamer-fine hair pushed back from her small face by a padded velvet band. She wasn’t tall, and the simple style of her clothes accentuated her fine-boned slenderness.
A delicate creature. Always appearing as though the slightest puff of wind might blow her over. That a harsh word would cast her into despair. Yet—
If it was possible, the eyes hardened even more. ‘The child was taken because she bears my name,’ he stated coldly. ‘I shall therefore do my best to return her to you unharmed.’
The door closed, leaving Sara staring angrily at the point where his stiff body had last been.
“The child’, she was thinking bitterly. He referred to Lia as ‘the child’ as if she were a doll without a soul! A mere inanimate object which had been stolen. And because he accepted some twisted sense of responsibility for the crime he was therefore also willing to accept that it was his duty to get it back!
How kind! she thought as her trembling legs forced her to drop into a nearby chair. How magnanimous of him! Would he be that detached if he truly believed Lia was his own daughter? Or would he be the one requiring the reviving brandy, the one people were dying to pump sleeping pills into because they could see he couldn’t cope with the horror of it all—the horror of their baby being snatched and carried away by some ruthless, evil monster? A monster, moreover, who was prepared to stop at nothing to get what he wanted from them!
‘Oh, God,’ she choked, burying her face in her hands in an effort to block out her thoughts because they were so unbearable.
Her baby, in the hands of a madman. Her baby, frightened and bewildered as to what was happening to her. Her baby, wanting her mama and not understanding why she was not there when she had always been there for her before—always!
What kind of unfeeling monster would take a small child away from her mama? she wondered starkly. What made a person that bad inside? That cruel? That—?
She stopped, dragging her hands from her face as a sudden thought leapt into her head.
There really was only one person she knew who was capable of doing something like this.
Alfredo Santino. Father to the son. And ten times more ruthless than Nicolas could ever learn to be.
And he hated Sara. Hated her for daring to think herself good enough for his wonderful son. He was the man who had vowed retribution on her for luring his son away from the high-powered Sicilian marriage he’d had mapped out for him, which had then made the father look a fool in the eyes of his peers—if Alfredo Santino accepted anyone as his peer, that was. If Nicolas saw himself as omnipotent, then the father considered himself the same but more so.
But Alfredo had already exacted his retribution on her, surely? She frowned. So why—?
‘No.’ Suddenly she was on her feet again, still trembling—not with weakness this time but with a stark, clamouring.fear that made it a struggle even to keep upright as she stumbled across the drawing-room floor and out into the hall.
CHAPTER TWO
A BIG man in a grey suit and with a tough-looking face stood guard just outside the door. A stranger.
‘Where is Nicolas?’ she asked shakily. ‘M-my husband, where is he?’
His gaze drifted towards the closed study door. ‘Mr Santino wished not to be disturbed.’
Sicilian. His accent was as Sicilian as the voice that had spoken to her on the phone. She shuddered and stepped past him, ignoring the very unsubtle hint in his reply, to hurry across the hallway and push open the study door.
He was half sitting on the edge of the big solid oak desk and he wasn’t alone. The two policemen were with him, and someone she instantly recognised as Nicolas’s right-hand man. Toni Valetta. All of them were in a huddle around something on the desk with their heads tilted down. But they shot upright in surprise at her abrupt entrance.
She ignored them all, her anxious eyes homing in on the only one in this room who counted. ‘Nicolas...’ She took a couple of urgent steps towards him. ‘I—’
His hand snaked out—not towards her but to something on the desk. And it was only as she heard an electronic click followed by a sudden deathly silence that it hit her just what had been going on here, and what her ears had picked up but her mind had refused to recognise until Nicolas had rendered the room silent.
God. She stopped, went white, closed her eyes, swayed. It had been her Lia’s voice, her baby murmuring, ‘Mama? Mama?’ before it had been so severely cut off.
‘Don’t touch her!’
The command was barked from a raspingly threatening throat.
She didn’t know who had tried to touch her, who had reached her first as she began to sink, as if in slow motion, to the thick carpet beneath her feet. But she recognised Nicolas’s arms as they came around her, breaking her fall, catching her to his chest and holding her there as something solid hit the back of her knees, impelling her to sit down.
He didn’t leave go, lowering his body with hers as he guided her into the chair, so that she could still lean weakly against him. Her heart had accelerated out of all control, her breathing fast and shallow, her mind—her mind blanked out by a horror that was more than she could bear.
And he was cursing softly, roundly, cursing in Italian, in English, cursing over her head at someone, cursing at her. Her fingers came up, ice-cold and numb, scrambling over his shirtfront and up his taut throat until they found his mouth, tight-lipped with fury.
She could have slapped him full in the face for the reaction she got. He froze, right there in front of all those watching faces; he froze into a statue of stunned silence with her trembling fingers pressed against his mouth.
‘Nic,’ she whispered frailly, not even knowing that she had shortened his name to that more intimate version she’d rarely used to call him, and only then when she’d been totally, utterly lost in him. ‘My baby. That was my baby...’
Nicolas Santino, squatting there with her wonderful hair splayed across his big shoulders so that the sweet rose scent of it completely surrounded him, closed his hard eyes on a moment of stark, muscle-locking pain.
Then, ‘Shush,’ he murmured, and reached up to grasp the fingers covering his mouth, touching them briefly to his lips before clasping them gently in his hand. ‘Sara, she is fine. She is asking for you but she is not distressed. You understand me, cara? She is—’
She passed out. At last—and perhaps it seemed fortunate to all those who had worriedly observed her all day—she finally caved in beneath the pressure of it all and went limp against the man holding her.
She came around to find herself in her own room, lying on her own bed, with the doctor leaning over her. He smiled warmly but briefly. ‘I want you to take these, Mrs Santino,’ he murmured, holding two small white pills and a glass of water out to her.
But she shook her head, closing her eyes again while she tried to remember what had happened. She remembered running across the hall, remembered opening the door to the study and racing inside, but what she couldn’t remember was why she’d felt the dire need to go there. She remembered seeing Nicolas in the room, and Toni and the two policemen. She remembered them all jerking to attention at her rude entry and her taking several steps towards Nicolas. Then—
Oh, God. Full recall shuddered through her on a nauseous wave. ‘Where’s Nicolas?’ she gasped.
‘Here,’ his grim voice replied.
Her eyes flickered open to find him looking down at her from the other side of the bed. He looked different somehow, as if some of his usual arrogance had been stripped away. ‘You heard from them, didn’t you?’ she whispered faintly. ‘They called before the deadline.’ Tears pushed into her eyes. ‘They let my baby talk to you.’
The comer of his tensely held mouth ticked. ‘Take the two pills the doctor is offering you, Sara,’ was all he said by way of a reply.
She shook her head in refusal again. ‘I want to know what they said,’ she insisted.
‘When you take the two pills, I will tell you what they said.’
But still she refused. ‘You just want to put me to sleep. And I won’t be put to sleep!’
‘They are not sleeping tablets, Mrs Santino,’ the doctor asserted. ‘You won’t sleep if you don’t want to, but they will help to relax you a little. I’m telling you the truth,’ he tagged on gravely as her sceptical gaze drifted his way. ‘I can understand your need to remain alert throughout this ordeal, but I doubt your ability to do so if you don’t accept some help. Shock and stress should not be treated lightly. You’re near a complete collapse,’ he diagnosed. ‘Another shock like the one you received downstairs may just have the effect you’ve been fighting so hard against and shut you down completely. Take the pills.’ He offered them to her again. ‘Trust me.’
Trust him. She looked into his gravely sympathetic eyes and wondered if she could trust him. She had not allowed herself to trust any man in almost three years. Not any man.
‘Take the pills, Sara.’ Nicolas placed his own weight behind the advice, voice grim, utterly unmoving. ‘Or watch me hold you down while the doctor sticks a hypodermic syringe in your arm.’
She took the pills. Nicolas had not and never would make idle threats. And she wasn’t a fool. She knew that if they did resort to a needle it would not be injecting a relaxing aid into her system.
Nobody spoke for several minutes after that, Sara lying there with her eyes closed, the doctor standing by the bed with her wrist gently clasped between his finger and thumb, and the silence was so profound that she fancied she could actually hear the light tick of someone’s watch as it counted out the seconds.
She knew even before the doctor dropped her wrist and gave the back of her hand a pat that her pulse had lost that hectic flurry it had had for the last several hours and returned to a more normal rate. She sensed the two men exchanging glances then heard the soft tread of feet moving across the room. The bedroom door opened and closed, then once again she was alone with Nicolas.
‘You can tell me what happened now,’ she murmured, not bothering to open her eyes. ‘I won’t have hysterics.’
‘You did not have hysterics before,’ he pointed out. ‘You just dropped like a stone to the floor.’
‘Déjà vu, Nicolas?’ she taunted wanly.
To her surprise, he admitted it. ‘Yes,’ he said.
It made her open her eyes. ‘Only last time you left me there, as I remember it.’
He turned away, ostensibly simply to hunt out a chair, which he drew up beside the bed, then sat down. But really she knew that he was turning away from the memory she had just evoked—of him looking murderous, fit to actually reach out and hit her, and her responding to the threat of it by passing out.
Only that particular incident had taken place in another house, another country, in another world altogether. And that time he had walked out and left her lying there.
She had not set eyes on him again until today.
‘When did they call?’ she asked.
‘Just after I left you.’
‘What did they say?’
That well-defined shadow called a mouth flexed slightly. ‘You really don’t need to know what they said,’ he advised her. ‘Let us just leave it that they wished me to be aware that they mean business.’
‘What kind of business?’ It was amazing, Sara noted as an absent aside, how two small pills could take all the emotion out of her. ‘Money business?’
His mouth took on a cynical tilt. ‘I would have thought it obvious that they want money, since it is the one commodity I have in abundance.’
She nodded in agreement, then totally threw him by saying flatly, ‘It’s a lie. They don’t want your money.’
