He kissed her again, long and deep and achingly gentle. Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN Copyright

He kissed her again, long and deep and achingly gentle.

“This is it, Joanna,” he warned as he drew away again to watch her lashes flutter upward to reveal eyes dazed by a hopeless passion. “So keep looking at me,” he urged. “For this is what I am now. Not the guy who crept stealthily around your problems the way I did the last time we were together—but this man. The one who means to invade your defensive space at every opportunity. And do you know why? Because each time I do it, you quiver with pleasure more.”

“I can never be a proper wife to you.”

“You think so?” Sandro pondered. “Well, we shall see....”

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The Millionaire’s Mistress

by

Miranda Lee

Harlequin Presents® #2026

The Marriage Surrender

Michelle Reid

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

‘COULD I s-speak to Alessandro Bonetti, please?’

The public call box smelled of stale cigarettes. Pale-faced, the full length of her slender body muscle-locked by the mettle she needed to make this telephone call, Joanna barely noticed the smell or the unsavoury mess littering the floor beneath her black-booted feet as she stood there clutching the telephone receiver to her ear.

‘Who is calling, please?’ a coolly concise female voice enquired.

‘I’m...’ she began—then stopped, white teeth pressing into her full bottom lip as the answer to that question stuck firmly in her throat.

She couldn’t say it. She just could not bring herself to reveal her true identity to anyone but Alessandro himself when there was a very good chance that he might refuse to speak to her, and in the present state that she was in, she didn’t need some cold-voiced telephonist listening to that little humiliation.

She had been there before...

‘It—it’s a personal call,’ she temporised, closing her eyes on a faint prayer that the reply was enough to get her access to the great man himself.

It wasn’t. ‘I’m afraid I will have to have your name,’ the voice insisted, ‘before I can enquire if Mr Bonetti is available to speak to you.’

Well, at least that stone-walling response placed Sandro in the country. Joanna made a grim note. She had half expected him to have gone back to live and work in Rome by now.

‘Then put me through to his secretary,’ she demanded, ‘and I’ll discuss this further with her.’

There was a pause, one of those taut ones, packed with silent pique at Joanna’s rigidly determined tone. Then, ‘Please hold,’ the voice clipped at her, and the line went quiet.

The seconds began to tick slowly by, taking with them the desperation that had managed to bring her this far. A desperation that had kept her awake last night, trying to come up with some other way to get herself out of this mess without having to involve Sandro. But every which way she’d tried to look at it, it had always come down to two straight choices.

Arthur Bates or Sandro.

A shudder ripped through her, the mere thought of Arthur Bates’ name enough to keep her hanging onto that telephone line, when every self-preserving instinct she possessed was telling her to cut loose and make a bolt into hiding somewhere rather than resort to this.

But she was tired of hiding. Tired of—being this person who stood on her own, isolated by her own inability to reach out to another human being and simply ask for help.

So, here she was, she reminded herself bracingly, ready to ask for that help. Ready to reach out to the only human being she felt she could reach out to. If Sandro said No, get lost, then she would. But she had to give him one last chance—give herself this chance to put her life back together again.

After all, she consoled herself, against the fretful doubts rattling around inside her head, she wasn’t intending dumping permanently on him, was she? She was simply going to put a proposition to him, get his answer, then get the hell out of his life again.

For good. That would be part of her proposition. Help me this one time and I promise never to bother you again.

Easy. Nothing to it. Sandro wasn’t a monster. He was, in actual fact, quite a decent human being. He couldn’t still be feeling bitter towards her, surely? Not after all this time.

Then the telephone suddenly began demanding more money and her self-consolation died a death as a much more familiar panic soared abruptly into life, gushing through her system like a raging flood.

What am I doing? she asked herself frantically. Why am I doing this?

You’re doing this because you’ve got no damned choice! her mind snapped back, so angrily that it jerked her into urgent movement. Her trembling fingers reached out towards the small stack of coins she had piled up in front of her ready to feed into the pay box. She made a grab for the top coin in the stack—and stupidly sent the rest of them scattering so they fell in a chinking shower to the ground.

‘Oh, damn it,’ she muttered, starting to bend to pick up the scattered coins as a voice suddenly sounded down the earpiece.

‘Good morning, Mr Bonetti’s secretary speaking,’ it announced. ‘How may I help you?’

The voice made her shoot upright again. ‘Just a minute,’ she muttered, struggling to feed the only coin she had stopped from falling into the required slot with fingers that decidedly shook. The line cleared and Joanna took another few moments to pull her ragged nerves together. ‘I w-would like to speak to Mr—to Alessandro, please.’ She quickly changed tack, hoping the personal touch might get her past this next obstruction.

It didn’t. ‘I’m afraid I must insist on your name,’ Sandro’s secretary maintained.

Her name. Her teeth gritted together, eyes closing on a fresh bout of indecision. Now what did she do? she asked herself pensively. Tell the truth? Let this woman bear witness to the full depth of Sandro’s refusal, instead of the other cool voice she had spoken to before?

‘This is—M-Mrs Bonetti,’ she heard herself mumble, the name sounding as strange leaving her own lips as it must have sounded to the woman on the other end of the telephone line.

There was a short sharp pause. Then, ‘Mrs Bonetti?’ the voice repeated. ‘Mrs Alessandro Bonetti?’

‘Yes,’ Joanna confirmed, not blaming the woman for sounding so astonished. Joanna herself had never managed to come to terms with being that particular person. ‘Will you ask Alessandro if he has a few minutes he could spare for me, please?’

‘Of course,’ his secretary instantly agreed.

The line went quiet again. Joanna breathed an unsteady sigh into the mouthpiece, wondering how many cats she was setting loose amongst Sandro’s little pigeons by daring to make an announcement like that.

Again she waited, so tense now she could barely unclench her jaw-bone, the thrumming silence setting her foot tapping on the debris-littered concrete base of the call box, fingernails doing the same against the metal casing of the telephone. And there was a man standing just outside the kiosk, obviously waiting to use the telephone after her. He kept on sending her impatient glances and her palms felt sweaty; she tried running them one at a time down her denim-clad thighs but it didn’t make any difference, they still felt sweaty.

‘Mrs Bonetti?’

‘Yes?’ The single word shot like a bullet from her tension-locked throat.

‘Mr Bonetti is in conference at the moment.’ The voice sounded incredibly guarded all of a sudden. ‘But he said for you to leave your number and he will call you back as soon as he is free.’

‘I can’t do that,’ Joanna said, feeling a dragging sense of relief and a contrary wave of despair go sweeping through her. ‘I mean—I’m in a public call box and...’

Shaky fingers came up to push agitatedly through the long silken fall of her red-gold hair while she tried to think quickly with a brain that didn’t want to think at all. Sandro couldn’t speak to her and she didn’t think she could accumulate enough courage to do this again.

‘I’ll h-have to call him back,’ she stammered out finally, grasping at straws that really weren’t straws at all, but simply excuses to stop this before it soared out of all control. ‘Tell him I’ll call him back s-some time w-when I—’ Her excuses dried up. ‘Goodbye,’ she abruptly concluded, and went to replace the telephone.

But, ‘No! Mrs Bonetti!’ The secretary’s voice whipped down the line at her. ‘Please wait!’ she said urgently. ‘Mr Bonetti wants to know your reply before you... Just hold the line a moment longer—please...’

It was a plea—an anxious plea, which was the only thing that stopped Joanna from slamming down the receiver and getting out of there.

That and the fact that she had just had a revolting vision of Arthur Bates smiling at her like a very fat cat who was about to taste the cream. She shuddered again, feeling sick, feeling dizzy, feeling so uptight and confused now that she really didn’t know what she wanted to do.

Oh God. She closed her eyes, tried to get a hold on her swiftly decaying reason. Sandro or Arthur Bates? her mind kept on prodding at her. Arthur Bates or Sandro? The choice that was no choice.

Sandro...

Sandro, the man she had not allowed herself to make any contact with for two long wretched years.

Except when she’d told him about Molly, she then remembered, feeling what was left of the colour drain from her cheeks as poor Molly’s face swam painfully into her mind. She had tried to contact Sandro once—about Molly.

He had ignored her call for help then, she grimly reminded herself. So there was every chance that he was going to do the same now.

And why not? she derided. There was nothing left between them any more, hadn’t been for a long, long—

The phone began demanding more money again. She jumped like a startled deer, eyes flicking open to search a little wildly for another coin. It was only then that she remembered that she had knocked them all flying to the ground a few minutes earlier, and she bent down, functioning on pure instinct now because intelligence seemed to have completely deserted her.

But then, it always did when it came to Sandro, she acknowledged ruefully as her fingers scrambled amongst the dirt, cigarette ends and God alone knew what else that was littering the call box floor.

‘Mrs Bonetti?’

‘Yes,’ she gasped.

‘I’m putting you through to Mr Bonetti now...’

There was a crackling sound in her ear that made her wince. Her scrambling fingers discovered one of her missing coins. Grabbing at it, she straightened, face flushed now, breathing gone haywire, fingers fumbling as she attempted to push home the coin, the stupid panic turning her into a quivering, useless mess because she was about to hear Sandro’s dark velvet voice again and she didn’t know if she could bear it!

The man outside the call box got fed up with waiting and banged angrily on the glass. Joanna turned on him like a mad woman, her blue eyes flashing him a blinding glare of protest,

‘Joanna?’

And that was all it took for everything to come crashing down around her—the agitation, the panic—all crowding in and congealing into one seething ball of chest-tightening anguish.

He sounded gruff, he sounded terse, but oh, so familiar that her own voice locked itself into her throat. The man outside banged again; she closed her eyes and set her teeth and felt Sandro’s tension sizzle down the telephone line towards her, felt his impatience, his reluctance to accept this call.

‘Joanna?’ he repeated tersely. Then, ‘Damn it!’ she heard him curse. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes,’ she answered breathlessly, and knew she had just taken one of the biggest, bravest steps of her life with that one tiny word of confirmation. ‘S-sorry.’ She apologised for the tense delay in taking it, and tried to relax her jaw in an effort to find some semblance of calm. ‘I dropped my m-money on the call box f-floor and couldn’t find it,’ she explained. ‘And there’s a m-man standing outside w-waiting to use the telephone. He keeps banging on the glass and I—’

The rest was cut off—by herself, because she realised on a wave of despair that she was babbling like an idiot.

Sandro must have been thinking the exact same thing because his tone was tight when he muttered, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Sorry,’ she whispered again, which seemed to infuriate him.

‘I am in the middle of an important meeting here,’ he snapped. ‘So do you think you could get to the point of this—unexpected—honour?’

Sarcasm, hard and tight. Her eyes closed again, her chest so cramped she could barely drag air into her lungs as each angry word hit her exactly where it was aimed to hit.

‘I n-need...’

What did she need? she then stopped to wonder. She had become so addled by now that her reason for calling him at all had suddenly got lost in the ferment of her panic.

‘I n-need...’ Moistening her dry lips, she tried again. ‘Your—advice about something,’ she hedged, knowing she couldn’t just tell him outright that the only reason she was phoning him after all this time was to ask for money! ‘Do you think you could possibly m-meet me somewhere, s-so we can talk?’

No reply. Her nerve-ends reached snapping point A tight, prickling feeling began to scramble its way up from her tingling toes to her hairline. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t swallow, and, worse than all of that, she felt like weeping.

And if Sandro knew that he would fall off his chair in shock, she mocked herself.

‘I am flying to Rome this evening,’ he informed her brusquely. ‘And my day is fully taken up with meetings until I leave for the airport. It will have to wait until I get back next week.’

‘No!’ That wouldn’t do! ‘I can’t wait that long. I...’ Her voice trailed away, her mind flying off in another direction as she bit into her bottom lip on a fresh wave of desperation. Then, defeatedly, she whispered, ‘It doesn’t m-matter. I’m s-sorry to have—’

‘Don’t you damn well dare put that phone down on me!’ Sandro warned on an angry growl that told her that, even after all this time, he could still read her intentions like an open book.

And she could hear him muttering something to himself—cursing most likely—in Italian, because Sandro always did revert to his native tongue when he was really angry. She could even see him in full detail while he did it. Tall and lean, an unbearably handsome Latin dark figure, with brown velvet eyes that turned black when angry and a beautifully shaped intensely sensual mouth that could kiss like no mouth she had ever experienced, but could also spit all sorts at her without her knowing what the words were—but, hell, did she get their drift!

Then, emerging from the middle of all that Latin temperament, came a warning beep that the phone needed feeding yet again.

‘I haven’t any more money!’ she gasped into the mouthpiece while her eyes flickered anxiously across the dirty floor at her feet. ‘I’ll have to—’

‘Give me your number!’ Sandro snapped.

‘But there’s a man waiting to use the telephone. I have to—’

‘Maledizione!’ he cursed. ‘The number, Joanna!’

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.

So what had happened to the dream? she asked herself as she sat there staring into space.

Life had happened, she answered her own grim question. Life had jumped out when she was least expecting it to steal the dream right away from her.

And overnight she had gone from being the lively, loving creature who had so thoroughly captivated the man she loved, into this—this—hollow wreck of a person who was sitting here right now.

A hollow wreck who was seriously about to place herself in Sandro’s dynamic vicinity again?

Could she do it to herself?

Could she do it to him? That was the far more appropriate question.

Cash or kind.

Suddenly and without warning she began to shake—shake all over, shake badly. It had happened like this quite often since she’d had the ’flu.

But really she knew she was shaking like this because she had come full circle and back to making choices.

To making the choice that was no choice.

So she got up, put Molly’s photograph back on the bedside table, walked over to the sideboard to replace the ring box in the drawer, then went grimly about the business of getting herself ready to meet with Sandro...

CHAPTER TWO

PRESENTING herself at Sandro’s office premises at the appointed hour took every last ounce of courage Joanna had left in her—though at least she knew she looked OK. She had, in fact, taken great pains to make sure she looked her best—for his sake more than her own.

For Sandro was Italian; a sense of good taste, flair and style came as naturally to him as breathing. Joanna had witnessed him stroll around his home in nothing more than a pair of unironed white boxer shorts and a shrunken white tee shirt that showed more taut brown midriff than was actually decent—and still he’d managed to look breathtakingly stylish.

Then she grimaced, acknowledging that she had only seen him dressed like that once in their short but disastrous attempt at living together. Where most women would have found it a pleasurable experience to watch their men parade in front of them like that, she, on the other hand, had metamorphosed into a stone-cold pillar of paralysed horror.

Sexy? Oh, yes, he had looked sexy, with all of that dark, hair-sprinkled dusky brown skin on show, from long bare feet to strong muscular thighs, and his short, straight black hair looking slightly mussed, eyes sleepy because he had been dozing on the sofa, trying to combat the effects of jet lag because he had just flown back from a whistle-stop visit to his American interests. Even the signs that he needed a shave had not deflected from the fact that the man was, and always would be, sexy—to any woman.

Even this woman, whose only response had been to completely close down or go totally crazy.

Not that he had ever understood why she’d responded like that.

Not that she’d ever wanted him to understand why she’d reacted to his sexuality like that.

Yet, when she’d first met him, she had fallen in love with him on sight and had desired him so badly that sometimes she hadn’t known how she was going to cope without them making love. But in those early days of their relationship he had been busy and she had been busy, and she’d also had Molly to think about.

They would wait, they’d decided. Until they were married, until she had moved in with him properly, when, at last, they would have time and space to immerse themselves in what was bubbling so hotly between them.

Then the unmentionable had happened. And it had all gone sour for them.

Her fault. Her fault.

How Sandro had put up with her like that for as long as he did would always amaze her.

Pain. That was all she had ever brought to Sandro. Pain and frustration and a terrible—terrible confusion that had finally begun to make his work suffer.

He was a banker by trade, a speculator who invested heavily in the belief in others. He was young, successful, a man with boundless self-confidence who’d had to believe in his own good judgement to have become the success he was.

Marrying her had affected that judgement, had corroded his belief in himself. Two bad investments in as many months had eventually finished him off. ‘This cannot go on much longer,’ he’d told her. ‘You are stripping me of everything I need to survive.’

‘I know,’ she’d whispered tragically. ‘And I’m sorry. So very sorry....’

Walking out of his life had actually been easy by the time they’d reached that stage in their so-called marriage. She’d done it for him, she’d done it for herself, and had found a kind of peace in the loss of all that terrible tension that had been their constant companion. A peace she hoped—knew—Sandro had found too. He must have done, because she’d seen his name in print over the past couple of years, in articles praising his unwavering ability to latch on to a good business investment when he saw one.

So, walking back like this was going to be hard in a lot of ways, not least because she sensed that a simple phone call from her had already set the old corrosion flowing through his blood. To Sandro she was like a virus, corrupting everything he needed to function as a normal and self-confident human being.

She would make this short and sweet, she told herself firmly as she set her feet moving through those plate glass doors behind which were housed the head offices of the Bonetti empire. She would explain what she wanted, get his answer, then get right back out of his life again before the corruption could really take hold.

And she would not show him up by presenting herself in faded old jeans and a battered leather jacket! So she was wearing her one and only decent outfit, which had escaped the clear-out she’d done just a year back, when anger, and grief, and a whole tumult of wild, bitter feelings, had made her throw out everything that had once had an association with Sandro.

Except this fine black wool suit cut to Dior’s famously ageless design. The suit hung on her body a bit now, because she had lost so much weight during the last year or two, but most of that was hidden beneath the smart raincoat she’d had to hurriedly pull on because the threatened rain had decided to start falling by the time she’d left her flat again.

But, despite the raincoat, she felt elegant enough to go through those doors without feeling too out of place, and she found herself standing in a surprisingly busy foyer, where she paused to glance around her, wondering anxiously what she was supposed to do next. Sandro hadn’t answered her when she’d asked him that question; instead he’d got angry and slammed down the phone.

A sigh broke from her, tension etched into every slender bone, and her mind was too busy worrying about her next move to notice the way she caught more than one very appreciative male eye as she hovered there uncertainly, a tall, very slender creature with alabaster-smooth skin, sapphire-blue eyes and long, straight red-gold hair that shimmered like living fire in the overhead lights.

Beautiful? Of course she was beautiful. A man like Alessandro Bonetti would not have given her a second glance if she had not been so exquisitely beautiful that she turned heads wherever she went.

Not that Joanna was aware of her own beauty—she had never been aware of it. Even now, as Alessandro Bonetti stood by the bank of lifts across the foyer and witnessed the way half his male staff came to a complete standstill to admire her, he could see she was completely oblivious to the effect she was having on those men as her blue, blue gaze darted nervously about.

Nervous.

His mouth thinned, anger simmering beneath the surface of his own coolly composed stance. She’d never used to be nervous of anything. She might have lacked self-awareness, but she’d always glowed with vibrant self-confidence, had been strong, spirited enough to take on any situation. Now he watched her hover there like some wary exotic bird ready to take flight at the slightest sign of danger.

Her biggest danger, of course, being him.

She saw him then, and the fine hairs at the back of his neck began to stand on end in response to those eyes fixing on his own for the first time in two long years...

It was electrifying, an exact repeat of the first time their eyes had clashed across a room like this. Joanna felt the same charge shoot through her system like a lightning bolt. She stopped breathing, her heart seeming to swell so suddenly in her breast—like a flower bursting open to the first ray of sunlight it had encountered in so long—it was actually painful.

Why? Because she loved him—had always loved him. And knowing it quite literally tore her apart inside.

He was so tall, she observed helplessly. So lean and dark and sleek and special, with that added touch of arrogance he always carried with him, which only managed to increase the flower-burst taking place within her hungry breast.

He was wearing an Italian-cut dove-grey suit with a pale blue shirt and dark silk tie knotted neatly at his brown throat. His black-as-night hair was cut short at the back and styled to sweep elegantly away from his high, intelligent brow.

Her skin began to tingle, her eyes drifting downwards over sleepy brown eyes fringed by impossibly long eyelashes, and a thin, slightly hooked nose that was unapologetically Roman, like his noble bone structure, like his wonderful rich brown skin that sheened like satin over cheeks absolutely spare of any extra flesh.

And then there was his mouth, she noted with a dizzying swirl of senses that kept her completely held in their thrall. His mouth was the mouth of a born sensualist; it oozed sensuality, promised it, wanted and demanded it.

The mouth of a lover. The mouth of a Roman conqueror. The mouth she had once known so intimately that something inside her flared in burning recognition. It soared up from the very roots of her sexuality to arrive in a fire-burst of craving in her breast, making her gasp, making her own mouth quiver, making her want to taste that mouth again so badly that—

I can’t do this! she decided on a sudden wave of wild panic. I can’t be this close to him—face him like this and pretend to be cool and collected and indifferent to all of this—this excruciating attraction!

I’ve got to go. I’ve got to...

She was going to run, Sandro realised with a sudden tensing of his tingling spine. The urge to flee was literally pulsing in every tautly held muscle she possessed, and abruptly he jerked himself into movement, making her hesitate, bringing her flustered gaze fluttering up to clash with his own.

Where he locked it—with a sheer superiority of will; he used his eyes to lock her to the spot while he strode across the foyer towards her, as graceful as any supremely proficient cat mesmerising its prey before it pounced.

His movement brought the whole reception area to a complete and utter standstill, and the silence was stunning as all those present watched their revered employer make a bee-line for the beautiful stranger who had just stepped through their doors.

He reached her, pausing a careful foot away. ‘Joanna,’ he greeted quietly.

‘Hello, Sandro,’ she huskily replied, having to tilt her head back to keep looking into that very mesmeric face.

Then neither of them moved. For a long, timeless moment they simply stood there gazing at each other, enveloped by memories that were not all bad; some of them were, in fact, quite heart-wrenchingly wonderful.

So wonderful that her breasts heaved on a small, tight intake of air as a muscle deep down inside her abdomen writhed in recollection. Predictably she stiffened that disturbed muscle in rejection of her response.

Sandro saw and accurately read every single expression that flickered across her vulnerable face. The love still burning, the pain still hurting, the desire still clutching—then the inevitable rejection. His own eyes began to darken, sending back messages of an answering pain, of a desire that still burned inside him too and, perhaps most heart-wrenching of all, of a love well remembered, though long gone now.

After all—how could he still be in love with her after everything she had done to him?

He blinked then, slowly lowering and unfurling those impossibly long lashes as if he was using them to wipe away those answering messages and put in their place a cool implacability. Slowly his hand came towards her with the intention of taking her by the arm.

But Joanna saw the tendon running along his jawline tighten perceptibly as he did so, and was dismayed to realise that he was looking so tense because he expected her to flinch away from his touch in front of all these watching people.

She didn’t flinch. Sandro couldn’t know it, but she would rather die than show him up here of all places, on his own territory where he ruled supreme.

So his fingers closed around her elbow, and she felt the usual jolt of heat run along her arm in a direct warning to her brain that someone had invaded her personal space. But her blue eyes held his, calm and steady, and after a few more taut, telling moments, the tension eased out of his jawline and was replaced with a twist to his beautiful mouth that grimly mocked her small show of restraint—as if it offended him that she felt she had to protect his pride in front of all of these people.

‘Come,’ was all he said as he tightened his grip on her elbow then turned to begin drawing her across the silenced foyer, arrogantly ignoring every set of curious eyes that followed them.

‘This is awful,’ Joanna whispered self-consciously. ‘Couldn’t you have come up with a more discreet way of meeting me?’

‘Discreet as in covert?’ Sandro questioned drily. ‘You are my wife, not my mistress,’ he pointed out. ‘My wife I meet out in the open. With my mistress I am always very discreet.’

Stung to the core by the very idea of him being intimate with any woman, her heart began to fill with enough acid venom to curdle her system and blind her eyes to exactly where Sandro was leading her—until it was too late.

Then jealousy was suddenly being replaced by a crawling sense of horror that had her stopping dead in her tracks. ‘No,’ she protested huskily. ‘Sandro, I can’t—’

‘Privacy, cara.’ He cut right across whatever she had been going to say, ‘is required before we begin.’

Privacy, Joanna repeated to herself, as the power of his grip forced her into movement again, propelling her into the waiting lift where at last he let go of her so he could turn his attention to the console.

The doors slid shut. They were suddenly alone. Alone inside a tiny eight-foot-square box with grey panelled walls and nowhere to run to if she required an escape.

No.

Her heart was in her mouth. As the lift began shooting them upwards her stomach shot the other way. It was awful. She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and clenched her hands into two tight fists at her sides as an old clamouring reaction trapped her within a world of mindless dismay.

Sandro noticed—who wouldn’t have noticed when she was standing there quivering with her teeth biting hard into her tense bottom lip? ‘Stop it!’ he snapped. ‘I am not even touching you any longer!’

‘Sorry,’ she whispered, trying desperately hard to get a hold on herself. ‘But it’s not you. It’s the lift.’

‘The lift?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘Since when have your phobias added lifts to their great number?’

Sarcasm, she recognised, and supposed she deserved it. ‘Don’t ask,’ she half laughed, trying to make a joke of it.

But Sandro was clearly in no mood for humour. ‘Another no-go subject I am banned from mentioning, I see.’

‘Go to hell,’ she breathed, her eyes squeezed tightly shut while she tried to fight off the soaring panic.

‘And be virtually guaranteed to meet you there?’ he derided. ‘No chance.’

And once again they were sniping at each other. Like their telephone conversation earlier, they were proving yet again that they couldn’t be in each other’s company without all of this—emotion—spilling out

The wrong kind of emotion.

‘You may relax now,’ he drawled with yet more sarcasm. ‘We have come to a stop.’

Her eyes fluttered open to discover that they had indeed come to a stop without her even noticing it The doors were open and Sandro was already strolling out onto a plush grey-carpeted corridor. He walked off, obviously expecting her to follow him. After having to peel herself away from the lift wall, she stepped out on decidedly shaky legs, feeling as if she were pulling a whole load of heavy old baggage along behind her.

He was waiting for her by a closed door, stiff-backed and angry. Smothering a heavy sigh, because this was all becoming so damned fraught—and she hadn’t even got to the reason she had come here!—Joanna forced herself to walk towards him.

One of his long brown hands was resting on the door handle. He didn’t so much as glance at her, yet still timed the moment he threw that door open so he instantly followed her into a big airy office where a very attractive blonde-haired woman of about Joanna’s own age sat behind a desk.

She glanced up as they came in and smiled expectantly at them. But to Joanna’s further discomfort Sandro ignored the look, not intending, it seemed, to introduce the two women.

And why should he? Joanna asked herself as she followed him across the room to another door. I won’t be here long enough for it to mean much, even if he did!

When he opened the door he stepped aside again, obviously expecting Joanna to precede him. On an inner frisson of awareness to his electric closeness, she hurriedly brushed past him.

His office was a surprise—nothing like what she would have expected of the Sandro she used to know, she observed as she came to a halt in the middle of the room. This ultra-modern example of smoked grey executive decor bore no resemblance to the rich, dark wood antiquity of his private homes.

The door closed behind her. Joanna quelled the urge to stiffen up warily.

‘Take off your coat,’ Sandro coolly commanded.

Coat? She spun on her heel to stare at him, a fresh frisson of alarm stinging along her spine. She didn’t want to remove her coat. She wasn’t intending staying here long enough for it to be necessary!

‘I—’

‘The coat, Joanna,’ he interrupted, and when she still didn’t make a move to do it herself he began walking towards her, with his intent so clear that her fingers snapped up to begin undoing the buttons. He grimaced, mocking the fact that it took only the suggestion that he might try to touch her again for her to do exactly what he had told her to do.

Angry with herself for being so damned obvious, and annoyed with him for knowing her as well as he did, she drew off the coat and draped it across a nearby chair while he, thank goodness, diverted towards the big pale polished cedar desk standing in front of a huge plate glass window.

Then he turned and did the worst thing he could do as far as she was concerned. He leaned his spare hips against the front of the desk, crossed his ankles, folded his arms across his wide chest, then proceeded to study her slowly, from her tensely curling toes, hidden inside plain black court shoes, to the top of her shining head.

She flushed, lowering her face and gripping tightly at the strap of her shoulder bag. He always did have this knack for completely discomposing her with a look, just as he was doing now—deliberately, she guessed. And she hated it. Hated what it made her feel inside.

But she had a suspicion that he knew that, too.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ he remarked finally. ‘That suit hangs on you like an old sack. If you lose any more weight you will simply fade away. Why have you lost so much weight?’ he demanded.

‘I’m sorry,’ she snapped. But surely he could work out why she had got so thin! It didn’t take much knowledge of the last devastating year she had just lived through to understand it.

‘Sorry—again, Joanna?’ he mocked. ‘I remember that being your favourite word before. It used to infuriate me then. It still does now,’ he added grimly.

Her chin lifted, blue eyes flashing him a glinting warning that the very short fuse to her temper was alight. ‘You said you were busy,’ she reminded him curtly.

He dipped his dark head in wry acknowledgment of both the short fuse and the reminder that his time was precious. This was something else Sandro could never resist—riling her too-ready temper. He had once told her that it was the only really healthy emotion she had in her. He was probably right. It was the only one she had ever shown him during their short, disastrous marriage, anyway.

There was a knock at the office door. Joanna jumped nervously. Sandro grimaced at her nervousness, then his secretary was entering the room, carrying a tray set with coffee things.

The tension in the room must have been stingingly obvious, because she glanced warily at her employer, then skittered her gaze over Joanna, before murmuring some incoherent apology as she hurried across the room to place the tray down on a glass-topped coffee table set between wo low leather sofas.

No one else moved. Sandro wouldn’t, Joanna couldn’t, and the silence gnawed in the air surrounding them all as the poor woman did what she had to do then turned to leave again with a brief, wary smile aimed somewhere between the two of them.

Joanna watched Sandro watch the intruder leave, watched him run his eyes over the woman from the top of her sleek blonde head to the slender heels of her black patent shoes. It was born in him to study women like that, Joanna was sure he wasn’t even aware that he did it, but God she hated it!

Beautiful, she seethed in jealous silence. Of course the woman had to be beautiful! Sandro would not accept anything less in a woman who worked within such close confines!

‘Grazi, Sonia,’ he murmured rather belatedly, just as ‘Sonia’ was about to walk through the door.

She sent him a glance and it spoke volumes. Sonia was offended that he had not introduced her to his wife. But Joanna was only relieved. She had no wish to be nice to his secretary when she was too busy trying to subdue a second bout of jealousy that was so strong it literally fizzed beneath the surface of her skin.

Did Sonia do more than his typing for him? Could she be the very discreet mistress?

The door closed them in once again, and Sandro’s attention was back on her. He studied her stiff-boned, firmly blank stance for a few moments, then sighed as though her very presence here irritated the hell out of him. He waved a long-suffering hand towards the seating area.

‘Sit down for goodness’ sake,’ he muttered. ‘Before your shaking legs give out on you.’

‘They’re not shaking,’ she denied, but went to sit down anyway, choosing one of the sofas and perching herself on the very edge, hoping he wouldn’t play his old trick of sitting himself down beside her. It was just another tactic he’d used to employ to completely unsettle her. He’d used to gain some kind of morbid gratification from placing her on the defensive.

But this time, she was relieved to see, he decided not to bother with that one. Instead he turned his attention to pouring out two cups of coffee.

Joanna watched his every move, every deft flick of those long brown fingers as he poured out two black coffees, added sugar to his own but none to hers, used the small silver spoon to stir the sugar, then silently handed a delicate white china cup and saucer to her, before going to sit down on the sofa opposite with his own.

And he did it all without bothering to ask her if that was how she liked her coffee. Sandro possessed almost instant total recall. He could remember names, places, facts and figures without having to try very hard. It was a major asset in his line of business, he had once told her, to possess fast recall of any information he might have acquired concerning the subject under consideration at the time. It saved him a lot of hassle because it meant he didn’t need to waste time going off to gather up the information.

On top of that, he was astute, very astute. Few people managed to con him. Though she was one of those few who had managed to do it. And in some ways she believed he’d found that harder to forgive than anything else she had done to him.

‘OK,’ he said flatly. ‘Let’s have it.’

She shook, rattling the delicate bone china cup in its saucer so badly she had to lean forward and put them down before she spilled the coffee all over herself.

Sandro crossed one elegant knee over the other. That was all, no other reaction whatsoever, but the action captured her restive attention. He was wearing charcoal-coloured socks, she noticed inconsequently. His shoes were hand-made lace-ups in a shining black leather.

‘I need some money,’ she mumbled, hating herself for having to ask him, of all people, for it.

‘How much?’

Just like that. No hint of surprise, no raised voice. She had never asked him for anything before, not even a tube of toothpaste. He knew that. The man with total recall would remember that telling little fact.

Which also meant he had already worked out that this was a dire situation for her.

‘F-five...’ The rest got stuck in her tension-locked throat and she had to swallow before she could say it. ‘Five thousand pounds.’

Still nothing. No reaction whatsoever. She even glanced up, wary, puzzled, searching his impassive face for a hint of what he was thinking.

She saw nothing.

‘That is a lot of money for you, Joanna,’ was the only comment he made.

‘I know,’ she admitted. ‘I’m s...’ Sorry, she had been going to say, but she stopped herself and instead got stiffly to her feet, unable to remain still beneath that dark level stare for a single moment longer.

With a tight restlessness she moved herself away from his close proximity, aware that his eyes were following her, aware that his brain was working faster than any other brain she had ever known.

Aware that he was waiting for her to tell him what she wanted the money for but was determined not to ask her himself.

Reaching his desk, she rested the flat of her hips against its edge and crossed her arms over her body so her icy fingers could curl tensely around her slender arms.

The silence between them began to stretch; she could feel it vibrating like a tautened wire between them. But, in a way, it made her want to do something to stop it, so she turned abruptly to face him, lifted her chin and forced herself to look directly into his carefully neutral eyes.

‘I have a proposition to put to you,’ she announced. ‘I need some m-money and, since you are the only person I know who has any, I thought you could give it me in the f-form of a settlement.’

‘A settlement to what?’

Her heart suddenly decided to stammer. ‘A divorce.’

No response, not even a flicker of those long, lush, lazy lashes, the super-controlled bastard!

‘I know you can’t possibly want to hang onto this so-called marriage of ours,’ she raced on quickly. ‘So I thought it might be best to make a clean break of it.’

‘For five thousand pounds?’

Her cheeks warmed with guilty colour. ‘Yes.’

‘So, let me get this straight,’ he recounted, ‘You want to divorce a multi-millionaire for the princely sum of five thousand pounds. Now that, Joanna, insults my ego,’ he informed her, moving at last to get rid of his own cup and saucer, then relaxing back again. ‘Why not go for the jackpot and demand half of everything I own?’ he suggested. ‘After all, you are entitled to it.’

No, she wasn’t. She wasn’t entitled to anything from Sandro, not even the five thousand she was asking him for. ‘I just want f-five thousand pounds,’ she reiterated, staring down at some unremarkable spot on the smooth grey carpet, because the next bit was going to be even harder to say, and she couldn’t look at him while she said it. ‘And I need it today, if you can lay your hands on that much.’

‘Cash?’

She swallowed, then nodded. ‘Please...’

No reply. Again she was forced to look up so she could search his face for a hint of what he was thinking—and she saw nothing but a sudden terrible gravity that almost cut her in two.

Face flushing, she dropped her gaze once more, agitated fingers picking at the fine woollen sleeves of her suit jacket.

‘Perhaps you had better tell me why you need it,’ Sandro suggested very quietly.

‘I’ve got myself into debt,’ she admitted, so softly that Sandro was lucky to hear it. ‘And the people I borrowed the m-money from are riding my back for payment.’

He heard. ‘Who?’ he demanded. ‘Who exactly is riding you?’

She didn’t answer, her small chin lowering to her chest in an act of sinking shame, and another tense silence followed because she found that now she had come this far she just didn’t have it in her to tell him the full truth. He was bound to be so disappointed in her!

She had never done anything a man like Sandro would consider worthy. It had used to annoy him that she worked at two different jobs as a waitress, six days and nights out of seven each week. He could never understand why she had no ambition to do something better with her life. He’d disliked the tiny flat she used to share with Molly, and had even offered to put them both up in something more fitting.

But more fitting for whom? She’d always suspected he’d meant fitting for a man like him to visit; that, in his own way, Sandro was ashamed of his little waitress girlfriend, even if he was too besotted at the time to walk away from her.

And, on top of all of that, he hated gamblers. Said they were weak-willed losers in life who wanted everything the easy way. How did you tell a man who thought like that that you’d spent the last year working in a casino for miserable peanuts, only to gamble those peanuts away at the tables yourself!

She couldn’t. It was as simple as that. She could not do it. And she was just wondering if he would detect a lie if she came up with one that would cover a five-thousand-pound debt, when he pulled one of his other little tricks and confused her by suddenly changing the subject.

‘Where have you been living recently?’ he asked.

‘Here in London.’ She shrugged.

‘Still waiting hand and foot on other people?’

‘Yes.’

He sighed, his disappointment in her clear this time. ‘You did not have to go back to doing that kind of job, Joanna,’ he said grimly. ‘When we parted, I had no intention of leaving you so destitute that you had to return to that.’

‘You owed me nothing.’ And both of them knew there was more truth in that than really bore thinking about.

‘You are my wife!’ he bit out raspingly. ‘Of course I owed you something!’

Which led them neatly back to the money, Joanna wryly supposed.

‘What I find difficult to believe,’ he continued, ‘is that you, of all people, have got yourself into that kind of debt entirely on your own! In fact,’ he extended frowningly, ‘you always shied right away from the risk of getting yourself into debt for even the smallest amount.’

She grimaced, shamed and contrarily mollified by those few words of praise from this, her biggest critic. He was right, money had never been one of her gods—not in the shape of cold, hard cash in the pocket, that was.

‘So, who is it for, Joanna?’ Sandro demanded grimly. ‘Who really needs this five thousand pounds you are asking me for?’

Her chin came up, the frown puckering her smooth brow telling him that she did not follow his meaning. ‘It’s for me,’ she stated. ‘I got into this mess all by myself.’

But he was already shaking his head, expression grave again, saddened almost. ‘It’s for Molly,’ he decided. ‘It has to be. Has your sister managed to get herself into financial difficulties, Joanna?’ he demanded. ‘Is that what this is really about?’

Whatever Sandro had expected her to do or say at this very critical point, he certainly had not expected her to draw the air into her body in the short, sharp way she did—or for her face to drain of every last vestige of colour.

‘My God, that was cruel,’ she breathed out eventually, staring at him as if he had just thrust a ten-inch blade into her chest. ‘How could Molly be in trouble,’ she choked out thickly, ‘when you already know she is dead?’

CHAPTER THREE

SANDRO’S reaction was to shoot to his feet. ‘What did you say?’ he raked out hoarsely. Then, ‘Please say again,’ he commanded, sounding as though he had suddenly lost his grasp of the English language. ‘For I think I must have misheard you.’

‘But you knew!’ Joanna cried. ‘M-Molly was knocked down and killed in a traffic accident twelve months ago!’

‘No!’ The angry denial literally exploded from him. ‘I do not believe you!’

But Joanna wasn’t impressed. ‘I rang you—right here, at this office!’ she contended. ‘You wouldn’t speak to me, s-so I left a message with your secretary!’

That secretary? she wondered suddenly. Had she spoken with the lovely Sonia that day her whole world fell apart?

‘You rang here?’ What she was saying was finally beginning to sink in. He sounded punch drunk, suddenly looked it too—utterly punch drunk. ‘Molly is dead?’

‘Do you honestly think I would lie about something like that?’

Of course she wouldn’t, and acknowledgement of that fact actually rocked him right back on his heels, shock ripping down the full length of his lean, tight body as he stood there and stared at her—stared while his richly tanned face went pale.

Then, quite without warning, the famous Bonetti self-control completely deserted him and, on an act of savage impulse, he spun jerkily on his heel and brought his clenched fist crashing down on the glass-topped table!

Joanna gasped, eyes widening in numb disbelief as delicate china rattled on impact, then began to bounce upwards, tumbling through the air to land with a splintering crash just about everywhere! The glass table-top broke, not splintering like the china, but folding in on itself and shattering into big lethal pieces.

The ensuing silence was appalling. Broken china and glass, spilled sugar, cream and coffee lay spread across everything—the two grey leather sofas and the carpet!

And there was Sandro. Sandro slowly straightening from the utter carnage he had just wreaked, teeth bared, lips tightly drawn back, face ashen, blood oozing from the knuckles of his still clenched fist.

‘Oh, no,’ she whispered, coming out of her horrified daze to push a trembling hand up to mouth. ‘You didn’t know...’

‘Astute,’ he clipped, driving his uninjured hand into his pocket to come out with a clean handkerchief.

He began wrapping the handkerchief around his bloody knuckles while, shaken to her very roots, all Joanna could do was stand there and watch him. She tried to breathe but found that she couldn’t. Her lungs seemed to have seized up while her heart was thundering against a steel casing of shock that had wrapped itself tightly around her chest.

The door suddenly flew open, Sonia almost falling into the room with it. ‘Oh, good grief!’ she gasped, her eyes going wide in horror as they took in the carnage.

‘Get out!’ Sandro barked at her, swinging a look of such unholy savagery on her that she whimpered with a muffled choke and quickly stepped out of the room again, shutting the door behind her.

‘Th-there was no need to take your anger out on your secretary,’ Joanna murmured in tremulous reproach.

Sandro disregarded the rebuke. ‘I never got your message,’ he bit out. ‘Did you think I would have ignored it if I had? You did,’ he realised, seeing the answer etched into her unguarded face.

She had insulted him. Simply allowing herself to believe that he didn’t care about Molly’s death was probably the biggest insult she had ever given him.

And she had given him a few, Joanna acknowledged. ‘I’m...’

‘Don’t dare say it,’ he warned her gratingly.

Her mouth snapped shut, then on a shaky little sigh it opened again. ‘At first I refused to believe you would just ignore her death like that,’ she allowed. ‘But when I heard nothing from you, f-for days and days, I decided you...’ An awkward shrug finished what really no longer needed to be said. ‘And I was in shock,’ she continued huskily. ‘I could barely think straight. It was only after the f-funeral, w-when I’d moved from the flat and found somewhere else to live because I couldn’t bear to stay there without—without...’ She couldn’t say Molly’s name either, ‘It was only then that it really began to sink in that you hadn’t—hadn’t...’

At last she stumbled into silence. Sandro didn’t say a word, not a single word, but just ran his uninjured hand across the top of his sleek dark head, dropped it stiffly to his side again, then turned away from her as if looking at her at all offended him.

‘I’m sorry’ hovered on the tip of her tongue again but managed to stay there while she simply stared at him, feeling helpless, feeling guilty, feeling hopelessly inadequate to deal with the fractured emotions clamouring around the two of them.

‘When?’ he asked suddenly. ‘When did this happen?’

She told him the date, her low-pitched voice unsteady.

‘Madre di dio,’ Sandro breathed.

Molly had been killed a year ago to the very day.

Then he was moving, making her eyes instantly wary as he strode towards her, right past her, to angrily round his desk. His hand snaked out, catching up the telephone, while his other hand remained tensely at his side, the handkerchief bandage slowly staining red.

‘I want a print-out of all calls to this office on this date a year ago,’ he snapped at whoever was on the other end of the line. ‘And while you are about it you will bring in last year’s appointments diary.’ Slam. The telephone landed back on its rest.

Joanna blinked, still staring, still stunned by the incredible display of emotional fury from this man who was usually so controlled. It was awful, she felt awful for being the one to cause it And it only got worse because, quite suddenly, he dropped into the chair behind his desk then slumped forward, both hands going up to cover his face.

Once again the desire to say sorry was hovering precariously close to the edge of being spoken. She had truly believed that he was no longer interested in anything that happened to her. It had caused her so much hurt at the time—oh, not only because of her own wretched feelings of desertion, but also for Molly. Molly, who had thought the world of Sandro.

Joanna had hurt him with her bitter and twisted view of everything life had to throw at her. Now she wanted to go to that desk and put her arms around him, hold him—offer him some kind of consolation for the shock she had just dealt him.

But she couldn’t because her own maimed senses wouldn’t let her. So she turned and moved away a step or two, then just stood with her arms tightly folded across her body and her eyes grimly lowered from the temptation of Sandro, who looked still so in need of comfort.

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