The bedroom door was open, and a couple of maids were busily laying all Sara’s clothes out on the bed.
No! she thought on an upsurge of alarm. Alfredo had not already done it, had he? He hadn’t—?
‘Come with me.’
Catching hold of her hand, Nicolas all but frogmarched her out of that suite and along the hallway to the next, where he threw open the door and propelled her inside. She ended up standing in the middle of a beautiful white and blue sitting room; her eyes drifted dazedly around her surroundings without taking anything in.
The suite door shut with a controlled click. She spun back to face him. ‘What are they doing with my clothes?’ she demanded shakily.
‘Removing them,’ he replied. ‘The suite was not yours to begin with. I was allowing you time to settle before moving you, but, having witnessed the way you could attack a sick old man, I do not see why I should make any concessions to you—on anything!’
‘The suite was not yours … allowing you time to settle …’ Her mind was too busy sorting through what he had said to worry much about the angry way he had said it.
‘You mean,’ she ventured at last, ‘that you’re moving Lia and me up a floor, to the family apartments?’
For some reason her conclusion made him frown in puzzlement. ‘What have you been doing with yourself this last week?’ he demanded. ‘You cannot, surely, still be so ignorant of the changes that have been made here?’
Her answer was a blank look because she hadn’t so much as set foot into the rest of the house since arriving here. She had eaten all her meals in her own room and confined all her recreation to the beach and the pool, which had meant her only having to walk up and down the outer steps. Other than that she had stayed put, with no interest in reacquainting herself with a place where she hadn’t felt welcome the first time and was sure that that welcome would be even smaller this time.
His sigh was impatient. ‘This whole house has been completely redesigned since you were here last—essentially to accommodate my father’s less mobile state!’ he explained. ‘Oh, he gets around quite freely—as you saw just now,’ he added, with a flash of that anger to remind her why she had been dragged in here like a naughty child. ‘With the aid of special chair-lifts we have had fitted alongside the east stairway. But for the sake of comfort other changes were made.’
‘What changes?’ she prompted warily when he went grimly silent. She wasn’t a fool; she knew Nicolas was angry with her. She also knew, therefore, that he was not telling her all of this for her own health!
‘There has been a—reallocation of private facilities. My father now has the full use of what was previously considered the family tier. He needs specialist attention,’ he went on. ‘Twenty-four-hour nursing. Daily physiotherapy and so on. So rooms on that level have been equipped accordingly.’
‘Like a mini-hospital, you mean,’ she suggested.
‘Yes.’
Alfredo must be very ill to warrant such vast and expensive care and attention in his home, she realised, and flicked a look of pained comprehension at Nicolas for what he must be feeling. His father meant the world to him.
He dismissed the look with a cold lifting of his chin. ‘The guest suites, therefore, are now below us, level with the pool, recreation rooms and garden terrace,’ he continued. ‘Because this—’ he made a short, gesturing motion with his hand, which she presumed encompassed this whole tier ‘—is now my own private wing of the house.’
‘Ah, I begin to see,’ she said with a small, bitter, wry smile. ‘You want Lia and me out of your private rooms and down in the guest suites where we belong.’
‘No,’ he said silkily. ‘You do not see at all.’ His eyes narrowed on her face, his next words carefully chosen for maximum impact. ‘Your child remains exactly where she is. It is you who are moving. In here. In this suite—with me.’
Silence. She met that with total, woolly-minded silence. He watched and waited, his hooded gaze glinting over her long, bare legs, which had been faintly tinted gold in the days she had spent here already. Her plain pink shorts with their loose pleated style did nothing to camouflage the slender hips beneath them. Nor did the simple crop-waisted vest-top, which gave glimpses of her flat stomach when she moved, hide the fact that she was wearing no bra beneath it. Two firm crests were thrusting gently against the thin cloth in a dusky invitation that he would have had to be totally indifferent to not to feel the hot sting of temptation that hit his loins. He remembered too well how they tasted, how they would respond to the lightest touch from him.
Provocative. That was how she looked. A fine, sleek golden creature of sensual provocation. A woman he would be happy to die inside, so long as those breasts were there for him to suckle while he did so. So long as those long golden legs were wrapped around him. So long as that pink heart-shaped mouth was fastened somewhere on his skin, warm and moistly tasting him as he knew it loved to do.
Not that she was aware of any of this, he acknowledged grimly—not of her own sexual attractiveness or what it did to him.
Unaware. Just as her hands were unaware, he was sure, of the coil of garden wire she was twisting between them, and the secateurs and the fact that her wedding ring gleamed gold on her finger.
His wedding ring. The ring he had placed there. Once a gold ring of love, now a gold ring of betrayal.
Stiffly he turned away from both the temptation and the ring, despising himself—despising her.
His movement set her long golden lashes flickering, blue eyes zooming into focus on his long, tense back.
Then, ‘No,’ she said in flat-voiced refusal. ‘I will stay with Lia.’
He spun back, face fierce, the earlier coldness replaced by something else, something faintly disturbing. ‘Are we back to arguing about choices?’ he clipped. ‘Because you have none,’ he informed her brutally. ‘You will do exactly as you are told while you are under this roof.’
‘Except sleep with you,’ she objected.
‘You will,’ he insisted. ‘And you will do it without protest! You owe me that!’ he rasped in a bitter rejoinder.
Did he mean by that, that she owed him the use of her body in return for his retrieving her stolen child? she wondered in horror. ‘But you hate and despise me! You even hated yourself for what happened the last time we shared a bed!’
‘True.’ His hard face tightened. ‘But if I had wanted the whole world to know that Nicolas Santino was foolish enough to marry a faithless woman,’ he threw at her, ‘I would have denounced both her and her child three years ago!’
She blanched at the intended insult. He took the reaction as his due.
‘As it is,’ he continued, ‘to the world and this household, we are still very much man and wife. And man and wife share a bed and have a certain amount of marital privacy which does not include a child sleeping in the same room.’
‘But you haven’t been near me for three years,’ she cried. ‘How are we supposed to have a proper marriage with three years’ separation in the middle?’
Her scornful tone made his golden eyes glint. ‘You mean because until now you have preferred to spend your time at our London home where I have visited you on a regular basis?’
‘My God,’ she gasped as clear understanding of his meaning hit her full in the face. ‘You can be as two-faced as your father when it really comes down to it, can’t you?’
‘We will leave my father out of this, if you please,’ he said tersely.
‘I wish we could!’ she flared. ‘But since he lives here too and he knows exactly what state our so-called marriage is in isn’t