‘You know,’ he remarked suddenly, ‘you have the best pair of legs I have ever set eyes on. Those jeans do the most exciting things to my libido...’
So low-voiced and sensual, so evocative of a time when he’d used to say things like that to her all the time. She hadn’t realised how precious those kind of words were to her until she no longer dared to listen to them.
‘Please, don’t,’ she choked, feeling desperate, feeling flustered, feeling other senses begin to disturb her oh, so fragile equilibrium with low, droning vibrations of awareness to him.
But he only gave a small shake of his head and drew her even closer, parting his legs and wedging her between two long, strong muscular thighs. Her breath caught; her breast-tips were ready and waiting to sting into life at this mere hint that their most favourite stimulus was so close again.
His expression was so intense, so—Italian, a raw animal sexuality seeming to ooze from every silk-smooth golden pore. ‘You smell of me,’ he detected softly. ‘I find it most alluring...’
Oh, please, she prayed. Don’t let him do this to me! ‘This is crazy,’ she jerked out in rising panic. ‘I don’t know why you think it will be any different now than it was before!’
‘Tell me then, why you gambled away all of that money?’ he countered.
The money? What did the money have to do with this?
‘I told you why,’ she murmured distractedly, trying to prise away his imprisoning hands with her own. She couldn’t budge him, not one bit. ‘Sandro—please!’ she cried out in stark desperation.
He ignored it. ‘Your Mr Bates was of the opinion that you went about losing that money with a vengeance,’ he informed her. ‘With your eyes wide open to the eventual consequences.’
‘And you believed him?’ she charged, feeling sick to her stomach at the very sound of Bates’ name. ‘You of all people should know that had to be a damned lie!’
‘You would assume so,’ he agreed. ‘But then—I have never met a man more likely to send any woman screaming for the nearest place of safety...’
She realised then just what he was implying, and her eyes began to flash with stunned incredulity. ‘You think I got myself into that mess deliberately so I had an excuse to come begging from you?’ She gasped at his absolute arrogance.
‘Did you?’ he challenged outright. ‘Or was it more complex than that?’ he then suggested, eyes narrowed, like two hot lasers trying to probe into the very darkest part of her brain. ‘Did Arthur Bates or do I bear a close resemblance to the man who attacked you, cara?’
Joanna went white, her whole stance stone-still for the few stunning seconds it took her to thoroughly absorb what he was actually suggesting here.
Then the words came, hot and hard and crucifyingly pungent, bursting forth from the very depths of her vilified psyche. ‘Two,’ she corrected. ‘It was two men who raped me, caro!’ she sliced at him with a stinging black mockery. ‘In a lift, if you want the full truth about it!’
And while he leaned there, seemingly locked into total immobility by what she had just thrown at him, Joanna knocked his imprisoning arms aside, pushed herself right away from him and made for the door back into the building, with nausea rising in her throat, the dire need to get away from everything giving her shaken limbs the impetus to carry her quickly.
She actually made it as far as the front entrance before Sandro’s hand snaked out to grab her arm and pull her to a jarring stop.
‘Don’t touch me!’ she bit out, angrily knocking the hand away again.
Sandro said nothing, his face white and drawn. But he took hold of her arm again and led her back to the lift. The doors stood open; he drew her inside. Joanna whirled away from him to stand glaring at the panelled wall while he grimly hit the ‘up’ button.
The doors closed. A thick silence throbbed in the very fabric of the walls surrounding them. Joanna closed her eyes and held her breath, and this time it had nothing to do with her aversion to travelling in lifts!
They stopped and she swung around, hair flying, eyes burning with a rage beyond anything she’d ever experienced before. She completely ignored Sandro’s existence as she stalked out of the lift and back into the apartment.
‘Forgive me,’ he murmured huskily from somewhere behind her.
‘May you burn in hell,’ she replied, and found herself walking as if by instinct into what her subconscious mind must have remembered was the drawing room of this super-elegant place. With the same unerring accuracy she found the drinks cabinet, snapped it open, poured herself a neat gin, then swallowed it.
‘I only knew you had been attacked on your way home from work,’ Sandro persisted. ‘I knew none of the details. Molly refused to discuss them with me. I jumped in with both feet, and I apologise. It was both cruel and thoughtless.’
Molly, she repeated angrily to herself. It had to be Molly who had broken a confidence and told him, because no one else had ever known! And even Molly had never known any of what she had just spat at Sandro.
‘She was worried about you, Joanna,’ he explained, seeming to need to defend her own sister. ‘She was worried that if you did not talk about it to someone you were going to make yourself ill.’
‘So, because I wouldn’t discuss it with her, she decided to discuss it with you.’ Joanna pushed the gin to her lips, but her hand was shaking so badly that the glass chattered against her teeth so she pulled it away again.
‘What did you expect her to do?’ Sandro sighed, her attitude sparking his anger. ‘You shut her out! You shut me out! The two people who loved you!’
‘I shut myself in!’ she responded angrily, swinging around to glare at him through eyes so hard and bright they actually looked dangerous. ‘It was my problem—my choice how I dealt with it!’
‘It was our problem!’ he retaliated harshly. ‘I had a right to know why the woman I’d believed loved me suddenly developed that sickening aversion to me!’
‘And what was I supposed to say to you, Sandro?’ she challenged him. ‘Oh, by the way, I was raped on my way home from work last week, so don’t worry if I can’t let you touch me. It isn’t personal! Would that have done?’
‘You should have trusted me enough to expect love and support from me! I could at least have given you that!’
‘Are you joking?’ she gasped, slamming the gin glass down with enough force to shatter it with the power of her anger. ‘Sandro—you had me up on some kind of damn pedestal! You went on and on about how wonderful it was that I was still a virgin! How you wanted our wedding night to be perfect—pristine white—no shadows!’
Her voice cracked. He spun his back to her, his shoulders bunched, his body stiff. It made it easier; she could shout out all the ugliness to his back much better than she could do to his face.
‘I was raped one week before our perfect wedding!’ she cried. ‘You were here in Rome! I was deep in shock! It was h-horrible!’ She shuddered, her arms wrapping tightly around herself. ‘I didn’t want to remember it, never mind talk about it! I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened and keep floating through the perfect dream marriage you had mapped out for us!’
‘So you thought you could marry me, come to my bed and pretend you were exactly what I was expecting?’ He spun back to lance her with embittered eyes and she lowered her gaze.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘Something like that.’
‘But when it came to it you could not even let me touch you, never mind make love to you. So the perfection was ruined anyway. You should have told me then,’ he directed. ‘Explained then. Absolved me of blame for your revulsion! But instead you let me suffer,’ he rasped out thickly, ‘not knowing what it was about me you could not tolerate! What you did, Joanna, was punish me for the sins of those animals who attacked you!’
He was oh, so deplorably right! So much so that she suddenly decided she couldn’t take any more! ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, spinning jerkily towards the door.
‘No!’ The ref
usal seemed to explode violently from somewhere deep down inside his angry breast, pulling her to a tense standstill. ‘We will deal with this now!’ he insisted. ‘We will drag it all out into the open and kick each other to death with it, if we have to! But we will deal with this now, Joanna. Right here and now!’
‘What more do you want from me?’ she reeled back to blast at him. ‘Absolution of all blame? Well, you have it!’ she declared, with a wild wave of one badly shaking hand, eyes glinting, hair shimmering, slender body quivering with a furious provocation. ‘I was at fault! I didn’t trust you enough to confide in you! I punished you for other men’s sins! I made your life a misery!’
‘You broke my heart and did not even notice,’ he tagged on gruffly.
That rocked Joanna on the very axis upon which she stood. She couldn’t believe he had actually said it! It was such an awful, awful thing for a man like him to openly admit!
Yet there was no longer any anger in his lean, dark expression, no biting regret that he had been driven to voice such a dreadful admission. He was simply responding to his own dictum and telling it as it was.
The truth, the full truth and whole truth—even if it was a gut-wrenching truth!
‘But you did more than that,’ he went on in a voice suddenly devoid of all emotion. ‘You despoiled me, cara. As surely as those men despoiled you without a qualm, you emasculated me with your revulsion. You stripped me naked of my pride in myself as a man—in my manhood! You scorned me as a lover and you revolted at my touch. You recognise these effects? They ring bells for you?’
‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered in shaken comprehension.
‘Now we will discuss cause and effect for you, if you please.’ As always, when his emotions were under pressure, his near perfect English slipped into a bone-melting Italian inflection. ‘For I think I have earned the right to know exactly what happened to make you treat me like that!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS downright amazing! Joanna decided astoundedly. How he had somehow managed to turn everything on its head like this! Just what did he think it was? she wondered. A competition as to which of them had received the worst treatment? Did he think she liked doing that to him? That she liked becoming that abominable creature he had just described to her?
‘All right!’ she declared, facing up to him like a boxer who had decided to come out of her corner and fight. ‘You want the full and gory details, Sandro? OK, I’ll give them to you!’
And, leaning forward to brace her hands on the back of one of his elegant lemon-drop sofas, she told him—told him everything in a tight staccato voice that described in detail the whole wretched ordeal, from the moment she’d found herself alone with those two men to the moment when they’d walked away from her.
By the time she came to a shuddering halt she was whiter than white, and Sandro had dropped into a nearby chair where he had buried his face in his hands.
Then he was slowly sliding his hands away from his face, though his dark head remained lowered, as if he was unable to bring himself to look at her now the full truth of it was out. It was like adding insult to injury, considering he was the one who had insisted on all of this.
Perhaps he was thinking something similar, because, ‘I’m sorry,’ he dropped with a dull thud into the drumming silence. ‘I should not have put you through that. But I needed—’
‘To know,’ she finished for him when he stopped to swallow. ‘If their “despoiling” of me was as brutal as my emasculation of you? Well, actually, it wasn’t. They didn’t even hurt me,’ she informed him, hands rubbing up and down her ice-cold arms. ‘I had no cuts,’ she explained, ‘no bruises. Nothing much at all to show that anything dire had ever actually happened. So I went home to Molly and said nothing,’ she said. ‘I went to work the next day and the next and the next...’
‘Stop it now, Joanna, please,’ Sandro inserted rawly.
But she couldn’t stop—didn’t want to stop. He had started the torrent, now it had to run its full course whether he wanted to listen or not.
‘I dressed myself up in white for purity, and walked down the church aisle with you as the perfect virgin bride. I smiled for the cameras, for you, for Molly and your family. The hazy fog surrounding me only lifted when I found myself alone with you here in this apartment, and I looked at you and thought—My God! This man is expecting his bride to be a virgin! And, well...’ She shrugged. ‘You know the rest.’
Oh, yes, she confirmed silently, Sandro knew the rest. He had already described it with a raw and cutting honesty.
His life with a wife who had been utterly incapable of being a wife.
The day she left him she’d had visions of him going down on his knees to thank Heaven for deliverance from a marriage made in Hell; she had expected to feel the same way about the break-up herself!
But living without him had been worse than living with him—and living with him had been torment enough. She loved him and had missed him, even though the thought of going anywhere near him had brought her out in a cold sweat.
So—what now? she wondered. Where did all of this wretched soul-baring leave them now that he knew it all?
Was he regretting his decision to begin their marriage again, now he knew exactly what he would be getting? Something was certainly troubling him because of the way he was sitting there, frowning at his own feet like that
Panic flared—a new kind of panic, a panic that almost knocked her sideways, because it revolved around Sandro not wanting her now, rather than the other way round.
And this time, she told herself painfully, I really can’t take any more.
‘I’m sorry,’ she choked, then turned and ran—out of the room, down the hallway and to the room she had been using before.
Once inside she closed the door behind her, then leaned back against it with a death grip on the door handle while she tried to snatch at a few short breaths of air in an effort to calm what was threatening to completely overwhelm her.
The fear of losing him—again.
Last time she had lost him because she couldn’t tell him the truth; this time she was going to lose him because of the truth.
Her heart gave a painful lurch, her eyes deep, dark pools of utter despair. Then she glanced absently at the bed, saw the rumpled covers she had scrambled out of that morning, saw the breakfast tray lying on top of them, where she had left it untouched.
Quite suddenly it all closed right in on her, the hurt, the grief, the ugliness and misery, tunnelling down to that silly tray with its rack of cold toast and its pot of cold coffee.
Her hand snapped away from the door handle and she walked unsteadily forward. She came to a stop by the bed then bent, her eyes blurring out of focus, as trembling fingers picked up what she hadn’t noticed lying on the tray that morning when Sandro had brought it to her.
It was a rose, a single red rose, with its stem cut short, its thorns removed and its bud just about ready to burst open.
He’d used to do this all the time, she recalled. An incurable romantic, who would bring her short-stemmed roses with their thorns removed so she would not prick herself. He’d used to lay them on the table at Vito’s restaurant and wait until she decided to acknowledge that the rose had been placed there for her, his eyes mocking, hers wickedly teasing, because it was a game they played.
The lover waiting to be acknowledged as the lover. The loved making him wait, because it had heightened the wonderful electric tension between them until it fairly sizzled in the atmosphere as she went about her business, serving at other tables, and Sandro watched her do it with a lazy understanding of what was really going on.
Loving without touching. Knowing without words. A single short-stemmed rose that lay on a table making its own special statement, the link between the red-haired saucy waitress and the excruciatingly sophisticated, tall, dark Italian diner.
This latest rose floated across her trembling lips, its delicate scent filling her nostrils and closing her eyes
, making her heart ache in bleak sad memory.
He had done the same kind of thing after they were married, too. Even in the midst of all the tension that surrounded them then, red roses would appear—by her plate at breakfast, on her pillow at night when she would crawl into her lonely bed in the room next to his.
Sandro’s silent statement. Sandro’s reminder that she was loved—still loved—no matter what she was doing to him.
Now here was another rose, making a statement when statements were no longer valid, because he hadn’t known it all when he’d left the bloom for her this morning.
He hadn’t known.
The floodgates opened quite without warning. Only this time it wasn’t bitter, ugly words that came flooding out—but tears—tears she hadn’t cried for years: tears of misery, tears of anguish, tears of pain, grief, anger and bitterness that had her sinking down onto the rumpled bed and keeling sideways, where she curled herself into a tight ball beside the tray with the rose clutched to her breasts and just completely let go of it all.
Outside, down the hallway, through the half-open door to the drawing room, Sandro stood by the window, his fists rammed into his trouser pockets as he listened to the dreadful storm without moving a muscle. His eyes were fixed on some obscure point on the distant skyline, his jaw locked solid, his teeth clenched behind grimly pressed lips.
When it finally went quiet, he pulled his fists out of his pockets and continued to stand there a few moments longer, staring at the plaster still covering his grazed knuckle, shifting his gaze to the other uninjured knuckle. Then he grimaced, as if he were considering throwing that fist at some solid object but knew it would be insanity to do it.
He moved then, gave himself a mental shake and walked into the hallway. Fifteen minutes after that he was knocking on Joanna’s bedroom door and pushing it open, bringing the tempting aroma of a tomato-based Italian sauce in with him.
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