Buch lesen: «Gold Ring Of Betrayal»

CHAPTER ONE

LONDON. Big house. Big address close to Hyde Park. The time: 17.45 p.m. Six hours since it happened.

And the tension in the formal drawing room was so fraught it picked at the flesh. People were standing about in small clusters, some talking in low, worried voices, some breaking into soft bouts of weeping now and then, others comforting, others holding themselves apart from it all, standing or sitting with a fierce self-control about them which held them silent and still.

Waiting.

Sara was of the latter group, sitting alone on one of the soft-cushioned sofas. She appeared calm, outwardly composed now as she stared down at the pale carpet beneath her feet, seemingly oblivious to everyone else.

But she was far from oblivious. Far from composed. Every movement, each sound was reverberating shrilly inside her head. And she was sitting there like that, straight-backed and very still, because she knew that if she did so much as move a muscle all her severely reined in self-control would gush screaming out of her.

It had already happened once. When the dreadful news had been brought to her, her initial reaction had been one of almost uncontrollable horror. They had tried to put her to bed then. Tried to force tranquillizers down her throat to put her out of her torment. Tried to render her oblivious to it all.

She’d refused. Of course she’d refused! How could any woman—any mother take refuge in sleep at a time like this?

But because they had been alarmed by her reaction, because they’d needed something tangible to worry about and she’d seemed the most obvious candidate, and because she’d found she did not have it in her to fight them as well as fight the multitude of terrors rattling around inside her head she had made herself calm down, pretend to get a hold on herself, and had taken up her silent vigil here, on this sofa, where she had been sitting for hours now. Hours...

Waiting.

Like the rest of them. Waiting for the man who was at the centre of all this trauma to come and take control of the situation.

He was on his way, they’d told her, as though expecting that piece of information to make her feel better. It didn’t. Nothing did. Nothing would.

So she sat very still, blue eyes lowered so no one could see what was happening inside her head, and concentrated all her attention on remaining calm while they, in their own anxiety, did not seem to notice the way the stark blackness of her long-sleeved T-shirt and tight leggings accentuated the whitened strain in her face. Nor did they seem to realise that she was sitting so straight because shock was holding her spine like a rigid rod of iron, or that her hands, clasped quietly on her lap, were in actual fact clenched and cold and so stiff that she didn’t think she could unclasp them again even if she tried to.

But at least they didn’t approach. At least they weren’t trying to comfort her by murmuring useless platitudes no mother wanted to hear at a time like this. At least they were leaving her alone.

The sudden sound of crunching tyres on the gravel driveway outside the house had everyone else jumping to attention. Sara did not move. She did not so much as lift her head in response.

There was the sound of voices in the hallway, one deep, sharp and authoritative, standing out from the rest as special. And the air in the room began to fizz.

Then footsteps, firm, precise, came towards the closed drawing-room door. Everyone inside the room turned towards it as it shot open, their eyes fixing expectantly on the man who appeared in its aperture.

But Sara kept her gaze fixed on the small square of carpet she’d had it fixed on for ages now, carefully counting the tiny rosebuds which made up part of the pale blue and peach design.

Tall, lean-featured, black hair, tight body. White shirt, dark tie, grey suit that sat on him as expensive silk should. Tanned skin—natural, not worked on. Long, thin nose, ruthlessly drawn, resolute sensual mouth. And the sharp and shrewd eyes of a hunter. Gold, like a tiger. Cold, like the features. A man hewn from rock.

He stood poised like that in the doorway for some long, immeasurable seconds, emitting a leashed power into the room that had everyone else holding their breath. His strange eyes flicked from one anxious face to another, surveying the scene as a whole without so much as acknowledging a single person. The young girl sitting in a chair by the window let out a muffled sob when his gaze touched her; her cheeks blotchy, eyes red and swollen, she stared up at him as if she were begging for her very life. Coldly, dismissively he moved on—and on. Until his eyes found Sara, sitting there in her isolated splendour, face lowered and seemingly unaware.

Then something happened to the eyes. What was difficult to determine but it sent an icy chill down the spines of those who saw it. He began to move, loose-limbed and graceful. Without so much as affording anyone else a second glance he walked across the patterned carpet and came to a stop directly in front of her.

‘Sara,’ he prompted quietly.

She did not move. Her eyes did focus dimly on the pair of handmade leather shoes which were now obscuring the patch of carpet she had been concentrating on. But other than that she showed no sign that she was aware of his presence.

‘Sara.’ There was more command threaded into the tone this time.

It had the required effect, making her dusky lashes quiver before her eyes began the slow, sluggish journey upwards, skimming his long, silk-clad legs, powerful thighs, his lean, tight torso made of solid muscle and covered by a white shirt that did not quite manage to hide the abundance of crisp black hair shadowing satinsmooth, stretched-leather skin beneath.

She reached the throat, taut and tanned. Then the chin, rigidly chiselled. Then the shadow of a line that was his grimly held, perfectly sculptured mouth. His nose thin, straight and uncompromisingly masculine. Cheeks, lean and sheened with the silken lustre of well cared for skin. Then at last the eyes. Her blank blue gaze lifted to clash with the hunter’s gold eyes belonging to the one man in this world whom she had most wished never to see again.

What was it? she found herself thinking dully. Two years since she’d seen him—coming closer to three? He had changed little.

Yet why should he have changed? He was Nicolas Santino. Big man. Powerful man. A wealthy man who could afford houses with big addresses in every important capital of the world. He was a slick, smooth, beautifully cared for human being. Born to power, raised to power and used to power. When he frowned people cowered.

The man with everything. Good looks, great body. Why should three small years change any of that? He possessed the godlike features of a man of fable. The hair, so black it gleamed navy blue in the light. The nose, that arrogant appendage he made no apologies for. The mouth, firm, set, a perfectly drawn shadow on a golden bone structure hewn from the same privileged rock those fabled men had come from. And finally the eyes. The eyes of a lion, a tiger, a sleek black panther.

The eyes of a hard, cold, ruthless predator. Cruel and unforgiving.

Unforgiving.

If her mouth had been up to it, it would have smiled, albeit bitterly.

He the unforgiving one. She the sinner.

It was a shame she viewed the whole situation the other way around. It meant that neither was prepared to give an inch. Or hate the other less.

Three years, she was thinking. Three years of cold, silent festering. And it was all still there—lying hidden beneath the surface right now, but there all the same. Three years since he had last allowed himself to share the same space as her. And now he had the gall to appear before her and say her name as though it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do.

But it wasn’t. And they both knew it wasn’t. And Sara was in no fit state to play stupid, pride-saving games to the opposite. Not with him. Not with this man, whom she had once loved and now hated with the same intensity.

She looked away, eyes lowering back down his length, dismissing his handsome face, dismissing his superb body, dismissing his long legs encased in expensive silk. Dismissing the man in his entirety.

The message was loud and clear. The room gasped.

‘Get out.’

It was quietly spoken, almost conversationally so, yet there was not a person in the room who did not understand the command or whom it was aimed directly at. Indifferent to them all, unmoving, he remained directly in front of Sara’s bowed head while he waited in silence for his instruction to be carried out.

And they jolted into action, responding like mechanical toys, heads, bodies, limbs jerking with a complete lack of coordination that shifted them en masse towards the door. Two policemen, both in plain clothes. One uniformed chauffeur, hat gone, hair mussed, face white. One weepy young nanny with her face buried in a handkerchief. A harried-looking housekeeper and her grim-faced man-of-all-trades husband. And the doctor who had been called out to treat the young nanny and had ended up staying because he had been seriously concerned that Sara was ready to collapse.

Or maybe because he had been ordered to stay by this man.

Who knew—who cared? Sara didn’t. He might be able to make other people quail in their shoes. He might be able to command mute obedience from anyone who came within his despotic reach. But not her. Never her! And she found it amazing if not pathetic that one man could walk in somewhere and command that kind of sheeplike obedience without even having to give his name.

But then, this one man was not just any man. This was a man who wielded such power that he could walk into any room anywhere in the world and command immediate attention. The same man who had had this house and its beautiful grounds locked up like a fortress within an hour of the incident happening.

It was a shame he had not had the foresight to do it before it had happened. Then this unwelcome meeting between them would not have needed to take place.

The last one out drew the door shut behind them. Sara heard it close with a gentle click, and felt the new silence settle around her like a shroud.

He moved away, coming back moments later to sit down beside her. The next thing, a glass was being pressed to her bloodless mouth.

‘Drink,’ he commanded.

The distinctive smell of brandy invading her nostrils almost made her gag and she shook her head, her waist-length, fine-spun, straight golden hair shimmering against her black-clad shoulders and arms.

He ignored the gesture. ‘Drink,’ he repeated. ‘You look like death,’ he added bluntly. ‘Drink or I shall make you.’

No idle threat. That became clear when his hand came up, his long, strong, blunt-ended fingers taking a grip on her chin so he could force her mouth open.

She drank—then gasped as the liquid slid like fire down her paper-dry throat, the air sucking frantically into her lungs as though it had been trying to do that for hours now without any success.

‘That’s better,’ he murmured, believing it was the brandy that had made her gasp like that when in actual fact it had been his touch—his touch acting like an electric charge to her system, shooting stinging shocks of recognition into every corner of her frozen flesh. ‘Now drink some more.’

She drank, if only to hide the new horror that was attacking her. Him. This man. The bitter fact that she could still respond so violently to physical contact with this—person who had caused her so much pain and disillusionment and grief.

He made her take several sips at the brandy before deciding she’d had enough. His fingers let go. The glass was removed. By then the brandy had put some colour back into her cheeks—and his touch a glint of bitter condemnation into the blue eyes she managed to lift to his.

‘Is this your doing?’ she demanded, the words barely distinguishable as they scraped across her tense throat.

But he heard—and understood. The hardening of the eyes told her so. Eyes that continued to view her with a cold but steady scrutiny which quite efficiently gave her a reply.

He was denying it, using his eyes to demand how she dared suspect him of such a terrible thing.

But she did suspect him. ‘I hate you,’ she said. ‘I despise the very ground you occupy. If anything happens to my baby then watch your back, Nicolas,’ she warned him. ‘Because I’ll be there with a knife long enough to slice right through that piece of cold rock you may call a heart.’

He didn’t respond, didn’t react, which came as a surprise because his overgrown sense of self did not take kindly to threats. And she’d meant it—every single huskily spoken, virulent word.

‘Tell me what happened,’ he instructed quietly instead.

Her mind went hot at the bright, burning flashback to the young nanny stumbling through the door. ‘Lia has been kidnapped!’ she had screamed in outright hysteria. ‘They just ran up and snatched her while we were playing in the park!’

The memory launched her with a bone-crunching jerk to her feet, turning her from a wax-like dummy into a shivering, shaking mass of anguish. ‘You know what happened, you evil monster!’ she seared at him. Blue eyes sparked down on him with hatred, with fear, with a bitter, filthy contempt. ‘She was your one humiliation so you’ve had her removed, haven’t you—haven’t you?’

By contrast the golden eyes remained calm, unaffected. He sat back, crossed one neat ankle over a beautifully clad knee, stretched a silk-clad arm across the back of the sofa and studied her quivering frame quite detachedly.

‘I did not take your child,’ he stated.

Not his child, she noted. Not even our child. Her shaking mouth compressed into a line of disgust. ‘Yes, you did.’ She said it without a hint of uncertainty. ‘It bears all the hallmarks of one of your lot.’ Not said nicely and not meant to be. ‘Vendetta is your middle name. Qr should be. The only thing I don’t understand is why I wasn’t taken out at the same time.’

‘Work on it,’ he suggested. ‘You may, with a bit of luck, come up with a half-intelligent answer.’

She turned away, hating to look at him, hating that look of cruel indifference on his arrogant face. This was their daughter’s life they were discussing here! And he could sit there looking like—that!

‘God, you make me sick,’ she breathed, moving away, arms wrapping around her tense body as she went to stand by the window, gazing out on the veritable wall of security now cordoning off the property: men with mobile telephones fastened to their ears, some with big, ugly-looking dogs on strong-looking leashes. A laugh broke from her, thick with scorn. ‘Putting on a show for the punters,’ she derided. ‘Do you honestly think anyone will be fooled by it?’

‘Not you, obviously!’ He didn’t even try to misunderstand what she was talking about, his mockery as dry as her derision. ‘They are there to keep the media at bay,’ he then flatly explained. ‘That foolish nanny was supposed to be trained on how to respond to this kind of contingency. Instead she stood in the park screaming so loud that she brought half of London out to find out what was the matter.’ His sigh showed the first hint of anger. ‘Now the whole world knows that the child has been taken. Which is going to really make it simple to get her back with the minimum of fuss!’

‘Oh, God.’ Sara’s hand went up to cover her mouth, panic suddenly clawing at her again. ‘Why, Nicolas?’ she cried in wretched despair. ‘She’s only two years old! She was no threat to you! Why did you take my baby away?’

She didn’t see him move, yet he was at her side in an instant, his fingers burning that damned electrical charge into her flesh as he spun her around to face him. ‘I won’t repeat this again,’ he clipped. ‘So listen well. I did not take your child.’

‘S-someone did,’ she choked, blue eyes luminous with bulging tears. ‘Who else do you know who hated her enough to do that?’

He sighed again, not answering that one—not answering because he couldn’t deny her accusation. ‘Come and sit down again before you drop,’ he suggested. ‘And we will—’

‘I don’t want to sit down!’ she angrily refused. ‘And I don’t want you touching me!’ Violently, she wrenched free of his grasp.

His mouth tightened, a sign that at last her manner towards him was beginning to get through his thick skin. ‘Who else, Nicolas?’ she repeated starkly. ‘Who else would want to take my baby from me?’

‘Not from you,’ he said quietly, turning away. ‘They have taken her from me.’

‘You?’ Sara stared at the rigid wall of his back in blank incredulity. ‘But why should they want to do that? You disowned her!’ she cried.

‘But the world does not know that.’

Sara went cold. Stone-still, icy cold as realisation slapped her full in the face. ‘You mean—?’ She swallowed, having to battle to rise above a new kind of fear suddenly clutching at her breast. She had banked on this being his doing. Banked on it so much that it came as a desperate blow to have him place an alternative in her mind.

‘I am a powerful man.’ He stated the unarguable. ‘Power brings its own enemies—’

But—‘No.’ She was shaking her head in denial even before he’d finished speaking. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘This is family stuff. I know it is. I spoke to them on the—’

‘You spoke to them?’ He turned, those predator’s eyes suddenly razor-like with surprise.

‘On the phone.’ She nodded, swallowing as the terrible sickness she had experienced during that dreadful call came back to torment her.

‘When?’ His voice had roughened, hardened. He didn’t like it that she had been able to tell him something he had not been told already. It pricked his insufferable belief that he was omnipotent, the man who knew everything. ‘When did this telephone conversation take place?’

‘A-about an hour after they t-took her,’ she whispered, then added bitterly, ‘They said you would know what to do!’ She stared at him in despair, her summerblue eyes suddenly turned into dark, dark pools in an agonised face. ‘Well, do it, Nicolas!’ she cried. ‘For God’s sake do it!’

He muttered a violent curse, and was suddenly at her side again, hard fingers coiling around her slender arm, brooking no protest this time as he pushed her back into the sofa.

‘Now listen...’ he said, coming to sit down beside her. ‘I need to know what they said to you, Sara. And I need to know how they said it. You understand?’

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.