Sara lifted a limp hand to cover her aching eyes. ‘Then perhaps you should inform your father of that,’ she said wearily.
‘I don’t need to,’ he drawled. ‘He already knows it. And even if he does pine for the day his son rids himself of one wife to get himself another,’ he went on grimly, ‘he is in no fit state to do anything about it.’
He got up, shifting the chair back to where he’d got it from, then turned back towards her, his face suddenly carved from stone again. ‘You see, six months ago my father suffered a heart attack.’ He watched coldly the way her hand slid away from her shocked eyes. ‘It has left him weak in health and wheelchair-bound, barely fit to function unaided, never mind plot anything as underhand as this.’
Suddenly he was leaning over her again, intimidating and serious with it. ‘So keep your nasty insinuations about my father to yourself, Sara,’ he warned her. ‘It is one thing you daring to insult me with your twisted view of my family, but my father is off limits; do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, stunned—stunned to her very depths at the piece of news he had given her. Alfredo sick? she was thinking dazedly. That big, bullying man confined to a wheelchair? ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, meaning it—not for Alfredo but for Nicolas, who worshipped his father.
‘I do not need your sympathy,’ he said as he straightened. ‘Just a curb on your vile tongue where he is concerned.’
A knock at the door heralded Toni’s urgent appearance in the doorway. He glanced warily at Sara then at his employer. ‘They’re on the phone again.’
Nicolas moved—so did Sara, lurching off the bed with a mixture of stark urgency and dizzying exhaustion to land swaying on her feet.
‘No,’ Nicolas said. ‘You stay here.’ He was already striding towards the door.
Her blue eyes lifted in horror. ‘Nic—please!’ She went to stumble after him.
‘No,’ he repeated brutally. ‘Make her,’ he instructed Toni as he went by him.
The door closed. ‘I hate him,’ she whispered in angry frustration. ‘I hate him!’
‘He is merely thinking of you, Sara,’ Toni Valetta put in gently. ‘It would not be pleasant being witness to the kind of discussion he is about to embark on.’
She laughed, much as Nicolas had laughed minutes ago—bitterly, scathingly. ‘You mean the one where he barters for my daughter’s life?’
Toni studied her wretched face but said nothing; she was only stating the raw truth of it, after all.
‘Oh, damn it,’ she whispered, and wilted weakly back onto the edge of the bed. Whether it was the acceptance of that truth or the pills the doctor had administered that took the legs from her she didn’t know, but suddenly she found she did not have the necessary strength to remain standing any longer.
There was an uncomfortable silence, in which the man remained hovering by the closed bedroom door and Sara sat slumped, fighting the waves of exhaustion flooding through her.
‘Go away, Toni,’ she muttered eventually. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t get you in trouble with your boss by making a bolt for the study as soon as your back is turned.’
His sigh was almost sad, but he did not leave; instead he moved over to stand by the window. ‘I may not be the perfect choice of companion just now,’ he replied heavily, ‘but we used to be friends, Sara.’
Friends, she repeated to herself. Was that what they once had been? She knew Toni Valetta from years ago. He was Nicolas’s tall, dark, handsome assistant. Together they made an invincible team—Toni the smooth, smiling charmer, Nicolas the ice-cold operator. Anything Nicolas could not do himself he entrusted to Toni, and Toni’s loyalty to Nicolas was unimpeachable; the two men’s relationship was that close. Once, years ago, Sara had believed his loyalty to Nicolas had broadened to encompass her as well. And she had considered him her friend—her only friend in a world of enemies. She had felt so alone then, so cut off from reality, bewildered by the new, rich, high-society life that Nicolas had propelled her into, and afraid of those people who openly resented her presence in it.
Toni had been the only person she could turn to in times of need when Nicolas was not there.
But when the chips had been stacked against her even Toni had turned his back on her.
‘I need no one,’ she said now, making her backbone erect. ‘Only my baby.’
He nodded once, slowly, his gaze fixed on the garden outside. ‘Nic will get her back for you,’ he said with a quiet confidence that actually managed to soothe a little of that gnawing ache she was living with inside. He turned then, his dark brown eyes levelling sombrely on her. ‘But you have to trust him to do it his way, Sara.’
Trust. She grimaced. There was that word again. Trust. ‘They rang,’ she said jerkily. ‘Before their specified time. Did they say why they’d done that?’
He shrugged, his broad shoulders encased, like Nicolas’s, in expensive dark silk. ‘They were having us followed,’ he explained. ‘Nic and I. They tracked our journey from New York to here. I think they must have miscalculated how long it would take us to get to England and decided we couldn’t make it before the time they offered you.’ His grimace was almost a smile. ‘It must not have occurred to them that Nic would fly Concorde …’
As he was a man who flew everywhere in his private jet, Sara could understand it. It must have been quite a culture shock for Nicolas Santino to use public transport—even if it was the best public transport in the world, she mused acidly.
‘The news affected him badly, Sara,’ Toni put in deeply. ‘I don’t think I have ever seen him so upset. Not since …’
The words tailed off. Sara didn’t blame him. He had been about to say since Nic discovered her betrayal. Not quite the most diplomatic thing to have brought up right now.
‘Nicolas said his father had been—ill.’ Grimly she changed the subject, not wanting to hear how Nicolas had felt. She wouldn’t believe Toni’s interpretation of Nicolas’s feelings anyway.
‘A terrible business,’ Toni confirmed. ‘It was fortunate he was in London and not at home in Taormina when it happened, or he would not be alive today.’
London? She frowned. Alfredo had been in London six months ago when he’d been taken ill? But he never came to London. Had always professed to hate the place!
‘He spent two months in hospital here before he was well enough to travel home. Nic hardly left his bedside for two weeks.’
Nicolas had been that close to this house for two weeks and she hadn’t known it. She shivered.
‘It was all kept very quiet, of course,’ Toni continued. ‘Alfredo had too many delicate fingers in too many delicate pies for it to be—safe for the news of his illness to get out. Since then, Nic has been working himself into the ground, doing the job of two.’
‘Poor Nic,’ she murmured without an ounce of sympathy, adding drily, ‘Now this.’
Toni’s eyes flashed at that—just as Nicolas’s would flash to warn of the sparking of his Sicilian temper. ‘Don’t mock him, Sara,’ he said stiffly. ‘You of all people have no right to mock him! He is here, is he not?’ His beautiful English began to deteriorate at the expense of his anger. ‘He come to your aid without a second thought about it when most other men would have turned their back and walked the other way!’
‘As you would have done?’ His anger didn’t subdue her. Once upon a time it might have done, but not any more. None of these people would intimidate her with their hot Sicilian temperaments and cold Sicilian pride ever again. ‘Then it’s no wonder Nicolas is who he is and you are only his sidekick,’ she derided. ‘For at least he sees people as human beings and not pawns