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She gave it. Her time ran out and the line went dead. She dropped the receiver back onto its rest, then just stood there staring at it, unsure if Sandro had managed to get down every digit before they were cut off, scared that he had done, and terrified that he had not!
Almost faint with stress and wretched confusion, she bent again to search the grubby ground for her other lost coins, found them, then stepped out of the call box to let the man waiting outside take his turn on the telephone.
He sidled past her as though she was some kind of freak. She didn’t blame him; if he had been watching her enact her nervous breakdown inside that telephone box, then she knew she must have looked like a freak!
Sandro’s fault; it was always Sandro’s fault when she went to pieces like this. No one else could make her lose all her usually ice-cold self-possession as completely he could. And he had been doing it since the first time she ever set eyes on him. A few short minutes of his undivided company, and he had always been able to turn her into a shivering, quivering wreck of a useless creature.
Sex.
That single telling word hit her with a hard, cruel honesty. The difference between Sandro and every other man she had ever met was the fact that he was the only one who could stir her up sexually.
And that was why she was standing here, a shivering, quivering wreck. Because in stirring her up sexually he also stirred up all the phobias that sent her into this kind of panic.
Fear was the main thing: a stark, staring fear that if she ever gave in to the sex then her life would be over.
Because he would know then, wouldn’t he? Know what she was and despise her for it
The man came out of the phone box. He hadn’t been much more than a couple of minutes, which made her feel even guiltier for keeping him waiting as long as she had.
‘I’m so sorry I was so long,’ she felt compelled to say. ‘Only I had difficulty—’
The phone inside the kiosk began to ring and she made a sudden desperate lurch for it, forgetting about the man, forgetting everything as she snatched the receiver to her ear again.
‘What the hell happened?’ Sandro’s voice shot down the line at her. ‘I have been trying that number for the last five minutes and kept getting an engaged signal! Were you stupid enough to hold onto the receiver instead of hanging up and waiting for me to call you back?’
Well, Joanna thought ruefully, that just about said it. Stupid. He thought her that stupid, and Sandro suffered fools as most people suffered raging toothache.
‘I let the man I told you was waiting use the phone,’ she explained.
Another of those Italian curses hit her burning eardrums, then she heard him take in a deep breath of air and his voice, when it came again, was more as it should be, grim but controlled.
‘What is it you want from me, Joanna,’ he demanded. ‘Since when have you ever wanted anything from me?’
Which only showed that even when he was under control he still couldn’t resist another dig at her.
‘It isn’t something I can discuss over the telephone,’ she told him. Then as her own temper suddenly flared, ‘And if this is a taste of how your attitude is going to be, then it probably isn’t worth me taking it any further!’
‘OK—OK,’ he conceded on a heavy sigh. ‘So I am reacting badly. But I am up to my neck in work at the moment, and the last thing I expected, on top of it all, was for my long-lost wife to give me a call!’
‘Try for sarcasm,’ she snapped. ‘Pleasantries just don’t become you somehow.’
Their simultaneous sighs were acknowledgements that they both recognised they were reacting to each other now as they had always used to do: biting and scratching.
‘How can I help you?’ he asked, with more heaviness than hostility.
And Joanna relented too, saying with an equal heaviness. ‘If you can’t find time to see me today, Sandro, then I’m afraid I have been wasting your valuable time. I did try to tell you that,’ she couldn’t resist adding, ‘before you went off at half-cock.’
‘Five o’clock,’ he said. ‘At the house.’
‘No!’ she instantly protested. ‘I don’t want to go there!’ Then she bit her lip, knowing exactly how he was going to take mat horrified reaction.
But his lovely house in Belgravia held only bad memories for her. She couldn’t meet him there, would probably die of mortification before she’d even stepped over the threshold!
‘Here, then,’ he clipped. And now he really was angry: not hot, Italian angry but frozen, arctic angry. ‘In an hour. It is all I can offer you. And don’t be late,’ he warned. ‘I am working on a very tight schedule and as it is I will have to fit you in between two important meetings.’
‘OK,’ she agreed, wondering sinkingly if meeting him at his office was any better than meeting him at the house they had once used to share? In all honesty she had no idea, because she had never been to his place of work before. ‘How—w-what do I do? When I arrive there, I m-mean?’ she asked, her bottom lip beginning to feel as if it had been completely mutilated by her own anxious teeth. ‘W-will I have to tell someone who I...? Only I don’t like...’
‘Coming out of hiding?’ he suggested acidly. ‘Or don’t you like admitting your legal association to me?’
‘Sandro...’ she whispered huskily. ‘Can’t you appreciate how difficult I’m finding this to do?’
‘And how difficult do you think I am finding it?’ he threw back gruffly. ‘You walked out of my life two years ago and have never bothered to so much as show your lovely face since!’
‘You told me not to,’ she reminded him. ‘When I left, you said—’
‘I know what I said!’ he bit out. Then he sighed, and sighed again. ‘Just be here, Joanna,’ he concluded wearily. ‘After all of this, just make sure you don’t chicken out at the last minute and stand me up, or so help me, I’ll—Oh, damn it,’ he muttered, and the line went dead.
And suddenly Joanna felt dead: dead from the neck up, dead from the neck down. Dealing with Sandro had always ended up with her feeling like this. Drained, so sucked clean to the dregs of her reserves that it was all she could do to slump against the phone booth wall while she wondered wearily why she had set herself up for all of it in the first place!
Then a sudden vision of Arthur Bates sitting behind his cluttered desk as he issued his ultimatum flashed in front of her eyes, and, with the usual shudder, she remembered exactly why.
‘Payment, Joanna, comes in cash or in kind,’ he had declared in that soft and silken voice of his. ‘You know the score here.’
Payment in cash or in kind...
The very words had made her feel sick.
‘How long have I got to pay?’ she’d demanded with an icy composure that completely ignored the second option.
But the man himself had refused to ignore it. He had waited a long time to bring her down to this low point and he meant to savour every second of it. So he’d sat back in the creaky leather desk chair, inserted a heavily ringed finger into the gap between two gaping buttons on his overstretched shirt, then taken his time sliding his eyes over her slender figure, so perfectly defined beneath the tiny white waiter’s jacket and black satin skirt she had to wear for work.
‘Now would be good,’ he’d suggested huskily. ‘Now would be very good for me...’
Which had had the effect of freezing her up like a polar ice cap. ‘I meant to pay the money.’ She’d made it clear. ‘How long?’
‘A debt is a debt, sweetheart.’ He’d smoothly dismissed the question. ‘And you are already two weeks late with your payments.’
‘Because I was off work with the ’flu,’ she’d reminded him. ‘Now I’m back at work I can pay you as soon as I—’
‘You know the rules,’ he’d cut in. ‘You pay on time or else. I don’t make them for fun, you know. You people come to me to help you out of your financial difficulties and I say, Yeah—good old Arthur will lend you the cash—so long as you understand that I don’t take it nicely if you don’t pay me back on time. It’s for your own sake,’ he contended. ‘If I were to let you get behind, then you’d only end up in a worse mess trying to play catch-up again.’
He’d meant she’d have to borrow more from him to keep up the extortionate repayments on his high interest loan and thereby sink further in his debt. It was a clever little ploy. One which kept him, the loan shark, firmly in control.
But for her it was different, and she’d always known it. Arthur Bates didn’t want her money, he wanted her body, and by getting behind with her repayments she had played right into his hands. What made it worse was that she worked for him, which meant he knew exactly how much she earned; he knew he was in control of that part of her life. She waited on tables or worked behind the bar of his seedy little nightclub—the same club where she had got herself into debt by stupidly playing at its gaming tables.
Which actually meant that Arthur Bates believed he was in control of Joanna’s life every which way he wanted to look at it.
But then, Arthur Bates didn’t know about her marriage. He didn’t know about her connection to the powerful Bonetti family. He didn’t know she had a way out of the whole wretched mess—if she could find the will to use it.
Even with that will, she’d realized she was going to need time—time Arthur Bates was not predisposed to give her. So, there she had been, standing in front of him, feeling her skin crawl as his eyes roamed expressively over her, and she had done the only thing she could think of doing to gain herself time. She had lowered her lashes over the revulsion gleaming in her eyes, and offered him the sweet, sweet scent of her defeat.
‘OK,’ she’d muttered huskily. ‘When?’
‘You’ve finished for the night,’ he’d said. ‘We could be at my apartment in fifteen minutes...’
‘I can’t,’ she’d replied. ‘Not tonight, anyway...’ And she had given an awkward little shrug of one slender white shoulder. ‘Hormones,’ she’d explained, and had hoped he was quick enough to get her meaning because she was loath to go into a deeper explanation.
He’d understood. The way his expression flashed with irritation told her as much. ‘Women,’ he’d muttered. Then, suspiciously, ‘You could be lying,’ he’d suggested. ‘Using that excuse as a delaying tactic.’
Her chin had come up at that, blue, blue eyes fixing clearly on his. ‘I don’t lie,’ she’d lied. ‘It’s the truth.’
‘How long?’ he’d asked.
‘Three days,’ she’d replied, deciding she could just about get away with that without causing more suspicion.
‘Friday it is, then,’ he’d agreed.
And she’d felt too sick to do more than nod her head in agreement before she’d turned and walked stiffly out of his office, only to slump weakly against the wall beside his closed door, in much the same way she was now slumping in reaction to Sandro.
Only there was a difference, a marked difference between having reacted as she had through sickened revulsion at what Arthur Bates wanted to do to her, and reacting like this through helpless despair at what Sandro could do to her.
Sighing heavily, she forced herself to move at last, pushing out of the telephone kiosk and hunching deeply into her thick leather bomber jacket as she walked the few hundred yards back down the street to her tenement flat in icy March winds—weather that grimly threatened rain later.
Letting herself into the tiny flat, she stood for a moment, heart and hands clenched, while she absorbed the empty silence that always greeted her now when she stepped inside. Then, after a small flexing of her narrow shoulders, she relaxed her hands, and her heart, and began removing her heavy jacket.
Time was getting on, making deep inroads into Sandro’s one-hour deadline, yet, instead of hurrying to get herself ready for the dreaded interview, she found herself walking across the room to the old-fashioned sideboard where she stood, looking down at it as if it had the power to actually inflict pain on her.
Which it did, she acknowledged. Or one particular drawer did.
Taking a deep breath, she reached out and opened the drawer—that particular drawer.
And instantly all the memories came flying out; like Pandora’s box, they escaped and began circling around her, cruel and taunting.
So cruel, it took every ounce of self-control she possessed to reach inside, search for and come out with what she had opened the drawer to find. Then she was sliding it shut again with a gasped whoosh of air from aching lungs, while clasped in her trembling hand was a tiny high-domed box that instantly spoke for itself.
Stamped on its base in fine gold lettering was the name of a world-famous jeweller—its provenance in a way, or a big hint, at least, that what nestled inside the box was likely to be very valuable.
But the contents meant far more than just money to Joanna. So much more, in fact, that she had never dared let herself lift the lid of the box in two long years.
Not since she’d glanced down one bleak miserable day and noticed her wedding and engagement rings still circling her finger and been horrified—appalled that she had walked out on her marriage still wearing them! So she’d scrambled around in her things until she’d found the box and had put the rings away, vowing to herself to send them back to Sandro one day.
But she had never quite been able to bring herself to do it. In fact, each time she’d let herself so much as think about Sandro, the old panic had erupted, a wild, helpless, anguished kind of panic that would threaten to tear her apart inside.
It had erupted in that telephone kiosk only a few minutes ago. And it was doing it again now as she stood here with the small ring box resting in her palm. Teeth clenched, mouth set, grimly ignoring all the warnings, she flicked open the box’s delicately sprung lid—and felt her heart drop like a stone to the clawing base of her stomach.
For there they lay, nestling on a bed of purple satin. One, a slender band of the finest gold, the other, so lovely, so exquisite in its tasteful simplicity, that even as she swallowed on the thickness of tears growing in her throat her eyes could still appreciate beauty when they gazed on the single white diamond set into platinum.
A token of love from Sandro.
‘I love you,’ he had declared as he’d given the engagement ring to her. It was that simple, that neat, that special; like the simple, neat, special ring which, for all of that, must have cost him a small fortune.
He’d given it to her with love and she’d accepted it with love, she recalled, as the tears blurred out her vision and a dark cloud of aching emptiness began to descend all around her. For now their love was gone, and really, so should the rings have gone with it.
She could sell them, she knew that, and easily pay off her debt to Arthur Bates with the proceeds: just another of the ways-out she had spent her sleepless night struggling with.
But she knew she couldn’t do it. For selling these rings would be tantamount to stealing from the one person in this world she had taken more than enough from already.
She’d stolen his pride, his self-respect. and, perhaps worst of all, his belief in himself as an acceptable member of the human race.
‘You are tearing me apart—can you not see that? We must resolve this, Joanna, for I cannot take much more!’
Those hard, tight words came lashing back at her after two long miserable years and she winced, feeling his pain whip at her as harshly now as it had done then.
And it had been because of that pain that she had eventually done the only thing she could think to do. She had left him, walked out on their marriage to move in with her sister Molly, and had refused contact with Sandro on any level, in the hope that he would manage to put behind him the failure of their marriage and learn to be happy again.
Maybe he had found happiness, because after those first few months, when he had tried very hard to get her to change her mind and come back to him, there had been no more contact—not even when she’d phoned him up to tell him about Molly.
Molly...
A sigh broke from her, and, lifting her gaze from the box of rings, she glanced across the room to where a small framed photograph stood beneath the lamp on her bedside table and her sister Molly’s pretty face smiled out at her.
Her heart gave a tug of aching grief as she went to drop down on the edge of her narrow bed. Gently laying the ring box aside, she picked up Molly’s photograph instead.
‘Oh, Molly,’ she whispered. ‘Am I doing the right thing by going to Sandro for help?’
There was no answer—how could there be? Molly was no longer here.
But Sandro was very much alive. Sandro, the man she had loved so spectacularly that she had been prepared to do anything to hang on to that love.
Anything.
But then, what woman wouldn’t? Alessandro Bonetti had to be the most beautiful man Joanna had ever set eyes upon. The evening he had walked into the small Italian restaurant where she had been working waiting on tables had quite literally changed her whole life.
‘Alessandro!’ her boss Vito had called out in elated surprise.
She had glanced up from what she had been doing. Joanna could still remember smiling at the sight of the short and rotund Vito being engulfed in a typically Latin back-slapping embrace by a man of almost twice his own height
Over the top of Vito’s balding head, Sandro had caught her smile and had returned it as if he knew exactly what she was finding so amusing—which in turn had taken her laughing blue eyes flicking upwards to clash with the liquid brown richness of his.
And that had been it. Just like that. Their eyes had locked and an instant and very mutual magic had begun to spark in the current of air between them. His beautiful eyes had darkened, his smile had died, the full length of his long, lean fabulously clothed body had tensed up and his expression had changed to one of complete shock, as if he’d just been hit full in the face by something totally spellbinding. As she’d stood there, caught—trapped by the same heart-stopping sensations herself—she’d watched his hand move in a oddly sensual gesture across the back of Vito’s shoulders, and, to her shock, had felt the flesh across her own shoulders tingle as if he had stroked her, not Vito.
‘Who is this?’ he’d demanded of the little restaurant owner.
Vito had turned towards Joanna and grinned, instantly aware of what was captivating his visitor. ‘Ah,’ he’d said, ‘I see you have already spotted the speciality of the house. This is Joanna,’ he’d announced, ‘the fire outside my kitchen!’ And both men’s eyes had wandered over her bright hair, sparkling blue eyes and softly blushing face in pure Latin communion. ‘Joanna—this is Alessandro Bonetti,’ Vito had completed the introductions. ‘My cousin’s nephew and a man to beware of,’ he’d warned. ‘For he will be a dangerous match to your flame!’
A match to her flame... All three of them had laughed at the joke. But in reality it had been the truth. The absolute truth. Sandro lit her up like no other man had ever done. Inside, outside, she caught fire like dry tinder for him. And what was wonderful was the way that Sandro had caught fire with her.
It had been like a dream come true.
